Football Manager 25 Release Date Delayed Till 2025

Football Manager 25 release has been delayed till 2025, a first for the series.

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.

Update 2: FM25 has now been delayed till March 25.

“After careful consideration, Sports Interactive have made the tough decision to further delay the release of Football Manager 25. Following discussions with SEGA, our licensors and partners, we have agreed the best course of action is to delay the launch until March 2025. Specific platform release dates will follow once confirmed.”

We have made the tough decision to delay the release of Football Manager 25 until March 2025.

Statement: https://t.co/zW7dRd1Lkp pic.twitter.com/UKPnz4l0Gb

— Football Manager (@FootballManager) October 10, 2024

Update: We now have a confirmed release date of November 26th for Football Manager 25. The game will feature everything mentioned below and we have a sneak peek at when we will be getting more information. We’ll get a good look at women’s football in the coming weeks, alongside the new interface, tactics, match experience, alongside whatever “Your Manager” is.

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.