A huge delay to the latest instalment of the popular franchise.
Football Manager 25's release has been delayed further, it has been announced. The game will now not release until March 2025. This is a significant delay from the already pushed back date of late November.
This is because of the development teams ongoing struggles with moving the game over to the Unity game engine. Pre-orders for the game were already live. However, fans can claim a refund if they no longer wish to own the game when it does eventually release.
The Football Manager development teams statement in full:
After careful consideration, Sports Interactive have made the tough decision to further delay the release of Football Manager 25. Following discussions with SEGA, our licensors and partners, we have agreed the best course of action is to delay the launch until March 2025. Specific platform release dates will follow once confirmed.
In our last Development Update in September, we explained that we needed to push FM25’s original release back to give ourselves more time to deliver the best possible experience for this first installment in a new era of Football Manager. This additional time has not been sufficient to ensure the game quality and experience meets your expectations and our very high standards.
In the previous blog we explained that it has been a difficult development cycle for the studio. Many things have been moving slower than we had predicted – despite everyone in the team working at an incredible pace to try and get everything done. Timelines were already tight and, as rightly pointed out by many of your recent comments, we were simply rushing too much and in danger of compromising our usual standards. This has put an enormous amount of pressure on everyone working across the studio, who are all passionately committed to delivering the best game possible.
FM25 is the biggest technical and visual advancement in the series for a generation. We simply cannot compromise the delivery of this crucial juncture in Football Manager’s history by rushing to release it in November. Of course, this is not where any of us expected to be seven weeks out from our release but, in the spirit of our studio values, we always consider the bigger picture – and the bigger picture here is that we need this additional time to deliver a game that we can all be proud of.
For the large numbers of you who have already pre-ordered the game, we thank you very much for your trust and support. Given the delay, however, should you wish to claim a refund, please contact your retailer. Something you noted as missing from our announcement on 30 September was mention of Advanced Access on PC/Mac. We can confirm Advanced Access will be available ahead of the new release date and, when we are confident on how long that period will be, we will update you at the first opportunity. The new gameplay reveal will also now move to the end of January 2025.
We are intensely aware that this will be massively disappointing for you. We share that disappointment and are extremely sorry.
Thank you for reading and your patience. It means the world to us as we continue to work on creating a new era for Football Manager.
Football Manager 25 delayed until March makes fans wonder, what's the point?
As expected, this delay has been met with an extreme amount of disappointment by the Football manager community. Such a delayed Football Manager 25 release date does raise questions about if FM25 should release at all.
The traditional late October/early November release date that Football Manager was designed to coincide nicely with the football season in Europe. This primarily lets managers play the game alongside following real world football. But, it also gives the developers enough time to adjust teams, players and clubs to everything that happened over the off-season. There is then a further database update after the January transfer window.
The new March release date, which could be late March, would leave just a couple of months until the football season ends. Then, transfers begin, and the games database quickly becomes out of date. Breakthrough players and teams would potentially also have significantly out of date ratings.
As a result, a lot of fans are now calling for SEGA and Sports Interactive to skip Football Manager 25 entirely. This would let them move straight to developing Football Manager 26.
Importantly, with these delays being related to moving to Unity game engine, it is not unreasonable to assume this is having a knock on effect to the subsequent game.
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Should Football Manager 24's database be updated?
In order to at least keep managers occupied in the meanwhile, a common suggestion is to provide an updated database for Football Manager 24. This would give updated squads and ratings to managers, letting them simulate the current season. This would soften the blow of this delay significantly.
Additionally, with Football Manager 24 saves being compatible with '25, this wouldn't even need to preclude Football Manager 25 being delayed or cancelled even further. There is no statement on this being a possibility at the moment. However, the Football Manager 25 database is likely already gathered. Therefore, this is something that would be reasonably simple to do.
Regardless, given the game's development timeline seems to be in flux, expect more news on the future of Football Manager 25 over the coming weeks. It is implied that this delay is in part down to the communities reaction to the previous release date. This could mean that the studio is open to taking onboard this suggestion from the community.
Stay tuned to esports.gg for more Football Manager 25 news and updates.
