Three things in life are always certain – death, taxes, and a new Football Manager game dropping in either October or November. The iconic and massively popular management game series gets a fresh annual release like clockwork, but for the first time in two decades, there will be no new game for you to play this Fall. Citing a "difficult development cycle", Sports Interactive has announced that Football Manager 25's November release has been pushed back by around four months.
Fans of Sports Interactive's Football Manager (and Championship Manager before it) will immediately realize just how significant this news is, but for those less in the loop with the Football Manager 25 will mark the first time since the annual Football Manager series began in 2004 that a new entry won't be released in either October or November.
Sports Interactive had already warned that things weren't going as smoothly as it hoped, mentioning earlier this year that its timelines were being slightly nudged back and that its new game would drop towards the end of November, rather than the start. Just a couple of weeks ago, it released a reveal trailer featuring a November 26 launch date. However, the struggles don't appear to have subsided, and now FM 25 will drop in March 2025, roughly four months later than planned.
"Specific platform release dates will follow once confirmed," SI says in an announcement post. The studio also confirms that a gameplay reveal will arrive in January.
"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," the announcement post reads. "This has put an enormous amount of pressure on everyone working across the studio, who are all ionately committed to delivering the best game possible.
"FM 25 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."
While this is of course disappointing and problematic for FM 25, I do also wonder what the knock-on effect for FM 26 is going to be. Will FM 25 just have a shorter shelf life than usual? Will Sports Interactive skip FM 26 and simply deliver a massive transfer update to keep the content fresh?
Some fans are even calling for that to happen to the current game and for the dev to skip FM 25 altogether, given the length of the delay. Whatever happens, a setback of this size for an annual series is a tough thing to navigate.
While you could always go and sign some management games to pick up.
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