I got this news with a few days’ delay when I wrote last week that Football Manager 2025 had confirmed its release date for November this year. Now I know I shouldn’t have worried about it: Sports Interactive delayed the release of FM2025 until March 2025.
“In our last development update in September, we explained that we needed to delay the original release of FM25 to give us more time to deliver the best possible experience in the first part of the new era of Football Manager,” he says announcement.
“This additional time was not sufficient to ensure that the game quality and experience met your expectations and our very high standards.
“In a previous blog, we explained that this was a complex development cycle for the studio. Many things were slower than we anticipated – even though everyone on the team was working at an incredible pace to get everything done.
“Schedules were already tight and, as many of your recent comments have rightly pointed out, we were simply in too much of a hurry and our usual standards were at risk of being compromised. This has put enormous pressure on everyone working at the studio, who are all passionately committed to delivering the best game possible.”
Football Manager 2025 is set to be a technological leap and a “true sequel” in a way that iterative series games usually aren’t, as Sports Interactive abandons its in-house engine in favor of Unity. Due to the need for reconstruction, it will also lack some features typical of the series, including several game modes and international management.
SI says the previously scheduled “new gameplay reveal” will now be pushed back to delayed January 2025. However, ahead of FM2025’s release in March, the Advanced Access feature will return to PC and Mac, allowing pre-orders to start playing the game’s beta version early. They say they will confirm as early as possible.
I have no problem with delays, especially if it means developers taking their time to complete something. I can’t wait to give FM2025 a whirl once it arrives.
