The Football Manager from Sports Interactive has been released annually for 20 years at the end of a year to reflect the current football season. For the first time, Football Manager 2025 will not achieve this. The release has been postponed. This had become apparent.
How has the release changed?
The release of Football Manager 2025 was scheduled for early November 2024. In the 2nd week of November, the new game in the series is released, traditionally since 2015. In the years before, the Football Manager had even been released in some years in mid/late October.
But now the release has been postponed to March 2025.
This is a one-time occurrence that has never happened in the history of the series. Even during the Corona pandemic, Sports Interactive adhered to the release date despite significant problems. At that time, the game was released on November 24, about two weeks late.
Experts Had a Bad Feeling About the Announcement Trailer
Did we see this coming? Yes, this year’s edition of the Football Manager has been talked about for years as “the big thing that will change everything.” They are switching to the Unity engine. Moreover, they have been wanting to change established things for years. Football Manager 2025 will – may Messi help us – abolish the inbox, as no one writes emails anymore today.
In recent months, there have already been unrest among fans because the established process with announcement trailer and game presentation got mixed up, and there was very little information about the new game and much was unclear.
In the announcement trailer for Football Manager 2025, there was nothing to be seen that even remotely looked like gameplay (via Youtube).
Studio Does Not Want to Compromise Series Milestone by Rushing
Here’s what the studio says:
Many things have developed slower than we had predicted – and this, even though everyone on the team worked at an incredible pace to get everything done. The timelines were already tight, and as you rightly pointed out in many of your recent comments, we simply rushed and jeopardized our usual standards. This has placed enormous pressure on all studio employees, who are all passionately committed to delivering the best possible game.
FM25 is the largest technical and visual advancement of the series in a generation. We cannot jeopardize the release of this critical milestone in the history of Football Manager by rushing to release it in November.
Football Manager Fans Play on Steam for Almost a Year without Anything Else
What makes Football Manager so special on Steam? The special thing about Football Manager is that it is “played through” for a year. From November to October of the following year, a Football Manager on Steam hardly loses players.
Only when the new installment is released do the player numbers noticeably drop.
Currently, Football Manager 2024 on Steam still has an average of 44,482 players. That is only about 9,000 less than in the release month.
Isn’t there something like this in Germany? The Football Manager is traditionally a British game. Germany also had a long tradition of football managers, including iconic games such as “Bundesliga Manager Hattrick”, “Anstoß” or the “Football Manager” series, which ended in 2010. The German top football manager pro Gerald Köhler is now working on “We Are Football“
