Sports Interactive’s Football Manager has been released at the end of each year for 20 years to reflect the current football season. Football Manager 2025 will not be able to do this for the first time. The release has been postponed. That was apparent.
How has the release changed?
Football Manager 2025 was scheduled to be released at the beginning of November 2024. The new game in the series is released in the 2nd week of November, traditionally since 2015. In previous years, Football Manager was even released in mid/late October in some years.
But now the release has been postponed to March 2025.
This is a unique event that has never happened before in the history of the series. Even during the Corona pandemic, Sports Interactive met the release date despite major problems. Back then, the game came out on November 24th, about two weeks late.
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Experts already had a bad feeling about the announcement trailer
Did you see that coming? Yes, this year’s edition of Football Manager has been talked about for years as “the big thing that will change everything”. You switch to the Unity engine. They also want to change things that have been established for years. Football Manager 2025 will – Messi help us – do away with the inbox because no one writes emails anymore.
In the last few months there has been unrest among fans because the established process with the announcement trailer and game presentation was mixed up, very little was known about the new game and a lot was unclear.
In the announcement trailer for Football Manager 2025 there was nothing that even remotely looked like gameplay (via YouTube).
Studio doesn’t want to jeopardize series milestone by rushing
This is what the studio says:
Many things developed more slowly than we had predicted – even though everyone on the team worked at an incredible pace to get everything done. The timelines were already tight and, as many of your recent comments have rightly highlighted, we were simply in too much of a hurry and risked compromising our usual standards. This has put enormous pressure on everyone at the studio, all of whom are passionate about delivering the best game possible.
FM25 is the biggest technical and visual evolution of the series in a generation. We cannot jeopardize the release of this crucial milestone in Football Manager history by rushing to release in November.
Football Manager fans hardly play anything else on Steam for a year
What makes Football Manager so special on Steam? What’s special about Football Manager is that it’s “played through” over the course of a year. From November to October of the next year, Football Manager on Steam hardly loses any players.
Only when the new part appears does the number of players drop noticeably.
The current Football Manager 2024 still has an average of 44,482 players on Steam. That’s only about 9,000 fewer than in the release month.
Isn’t there something like that in Germany too? Football Manager is traditionally a British game. Germany also had a long tradition of football managers, including iconic games such as “Bundesliga Manager Hattrick”, “Anschlag” or the “Football Manager” series, which ended in 2010. The German top football manager crack Gerald Köhler is now working on “We Are Football”