Football Manager 2025: The game was canceled, let's move on to the next one

The Football Manager series has already been on the market for quite a few years and came as an evolution of Championship Manager. Sports Interactive transferred the rights to SEGA, with the collaboration between the two sides bringing us a new game every year. For 2024 and 2025, things do not seem to be going as the publisher and the development company expected. After two delays, Sports Interactive announced that the game is being canceled and that it will not be released even with a further delay.

In a post on the social networking platform X (formerly Twitter), the team preparing the game stated that «after extensive discussions with SEGA and reviewing every piece of information, we decided to cancel the release of Football Manager 2025 and focus on the next game in the series».

Those who have pre-ordered the game will be fully refunded, while those responsible for the project publicly admitted that this development is understandably disappointing for fans, at a time when everyone was waiting for the first gameplay reveals. The reason for this is that after years, the development team had promised significant changes to the gameplay and the biggest leap forward for the series in terms of mechanics and graphics.

Sports Interactive also admitted that it could have released the game unfinished and then continuously improved it with patches, however something like that would not fit its philosophy and would hurt fans' trust in the series. Football Manager 2025 was originally scheduled to be released in early November, while at one point it received an initial delay to the 26th of that month.

Shortly before release, SEGA and Sports Interactive announced that they were pushing it even further back and sending it to 2025. As was logical, this decision would… cost quite a lot, since the competitive seasons would be past their midpoint and public interest would be reduced. Also, it would be quite difficult to release a game within the first quarter of 2025, at a time when the next one, due after September, would already be in development. Thus, this difficult decision was made…