Football Manager 25 release date pushed back as devs confirm ‘challenging development cycle’ sees international management dropped

Sports Interactive has released a later-than-planned development update for the upcoming Football Manager 25, a mini reboot of the popular management franchise.

FM25 has long been earmarked as the version where the game will receive significant updates, none more so than the switch to the Unity game engine.

Now, following on from the last update in June, in a development update on the game’s blog, SI’s head honcho Miles Jacobson shared the news that the game will not only be arriving a little later in the year than it traditionally does but also that a once-popular feature has found itself on the cutting room floor.

The initial plan was that FM25’s release date would be unveiled at the start of September and pre-orders would open at the same time, however, Jacobson now reveals that, “we’ve had to shift the official announcement of FM25 to the end of September. The gameplay focus period will follow soon thereafter. Our target launch date has moved accordingly and is now scheduled for late November, rather than our usual early November slot.”

The move to Unity is also confirmed to have caused the team issues with Jacobson continuing, “As we’ve gotten deeper into the process and gained learnings, it’s fair to say it’s been trickier than we originally anticipated. The entire dev team has been challenged in a myriad of new ways and are doing an incredible job in the process. I’m excited to eventually share our hard work with you but we need a little more time before we can do that.”

One feature that has proved seemingly too difficult to make the transition is international management – a staple of the game for many, many years. After showing prowess as a club manager, previous games would offer up the chance to take over a national side. This will no longer be the case.

“The challenges we’ve encountered in the development process over the last couple of months have led us to make another difficult decision around game content: international management will not be a playable mode in FM25, FM25 Console, or FM25 Touch.”

Citing that the feature would not hit FM25’s quality threshold and that available data shows that less than 6% of PC players have used the mode, international management is no more, at least in the mainline versions. International management will remain in the FM25 mobile version.

“While difficult, these decisions are made for the good of the game and the majority of our players. We are determined to ensure that FM25, the first game in a new engine, is as good as it can be in the time we have. By pushing back FM25’s release date, we’ve given ourselves a few extra weeks of development time to try to deliver the best experience that we can for this first in the new era of Football Manager releases,” says Jacobson.

Something else that has been dropped from being shown is player weight, which will no now longer appear on a player profile with Jacobson explaining, “Through the creation of our Women’s Football database, we discovered that while the weight of male athletes can change a bit month to month, women’s body types are very different from men’s and their weight fluctuates a lot more, often weekly.

This perspective encouraged us to review the wider game, much like we have with all other areas, and we’ve ultimately decided to no longer show weight for any players in FM25.”

Football Manager 25 is due to shortly host a player-led playtest at the SI campus in London where players will test the new user interface of the game side-by-side with Sports Interactive development staff, ahead of the game’s new launch date at the end of November.

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