Football Manager 25 Release Date Delayed and International Management Removed

Football Manager 25 Release is coming soon, but not as soon as we had originally hoped.

We got an update about FM25 and sadly, it’s not good. Well, not good if you want the game early, but good if you want the best game possible. We have a slight delay, and confirmation of a few features being removed.

Football Manager 25 Release Date
Let’s get the worst news out the way first; FM25 has been delayed until the end of November, rather than the early November date that we normally get. In reality, this is likely just a three-week delay at worst, but still, given how many people play FM to live out remakes of real events it’s a shame the release is coming so close to the January window.

International Management is Gone, for now
So yeah, with the game shifting to a new game engine (Unity) the team decided to cut features that were taking up time. With just 4% of PC players even using the feature it was an obvious one to cut.

That said, it will return in future, more fleshed out than it was before. Which, in fairness isn’t going to be that difficult.

Everything under this point was from the info we had back when Football Manager 24 was announced. It is very likely that some of this might have changed.

New Engine, new beginning?
We got one major tease when FM 24 was released and it still holds our interest to this day:

“One key detail about Football Manager 25 is, the title won’t be like previous titles. With FM 24 being “the last of its kind”
We still don’t fully know what this means, but some people have speculated that FM 25 will see the series become a “live service” with a paid yearly update and possible smaller “DLC”.

But speculation is all it is for now, as we have no official info on this.

FM 25 will also see the game move over to Unity Engine. This means a new engine for the graphics package for all versions of FM. The move to Unity seems like a positive one overall, and we’ll make sure to make a new post when we get details.

For now we have no details on this, but testing is starting soon in the Sports Interactive offices in England.

Women’s leagues come to Football Manager 25
Update September 5th – One thing was mentioned with regard to the Women’s league in Fm25:

” 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. A very basic measurement will still be included under the hood, but it won’t be visible on the front end anymore.”
After being announced in 2021, we’re finally going to see Women’s football joining the game on FM 25. The team has hired lots of new staff who specialise in the sport to help them with research and development. We assume it will be included as part of whatever package FM 25 comes in, rather than a separate title. It’s certainly a major undertaking, considering the FM database for the men’s game has taken decades to build up.

That’s all we know for now, but we expect to hear way more in the game’s official gameplay reveal sometime towards the end of September if we are very lucky.

David has written for games media outlets for the last ten years. With his first major esports role being with Esports News UK covering mostly UK League of Legends. David is also a member of the British Esports Association and is an advisor to them on World of Warcraft Esports. More recently David has worked for Esports Insider and Red Bull as an esports journalist.
David later became Editor at ESTNN and now leads the current team.