I was a few days late with the news when I wrote last week that Football Manager 2025 had confirmed its release date for this November. Now I know that I shouldn’t have bothered: Sports Interactive have now delayed FM2025 until March 2025.
“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 instalment in a new era of Football Manager,” says the announcement.
“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.”
Football Manager 2025 is intended to be a technologically leap and a “true sequel” in a way entries in the iterative series normally aren’t, as Sports Interactive ditch their internal engine in favour of Unity. It’s also, because of the rebuild necessary, going to lack some of the features typical to the series, including several game modes and international management.
SI say that a previously planned “new gameplay reveal” will now shift to the end of January 2025. Ahead of FM2025’s release in March, however, Advanced Access will return on PC and Mac, letting pre-orderers start playing a beta of the game early. They say they’ll confirm how early as soon as possible.
I’ve no problem with a delay, particularly if it means developers aren’t crunching to finish something. I look forward to giving FM2025 a whirl whenever it does arrive.