Football Manager 25 Delayed, Again

Well, now I know how you all felt when the 2019/2020 football season was cut short and delayed in places. Football Manager 25 has been delayed out of 2024, making the title actually mean something like the recent WWE games. Unlike the YouTube thumbnails that informed many of us of the news, I’m not disappointed and angry, quite the opposite. I’ve set my mentality to be cautiously optimistic.

Only a week ago we got the release date and now we’re getting the second delay announcement, so let’s take a look at the press release sent out and published on Twitter. Let’s start at the boilerplate stuff: “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.”

It goes on to say, “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 [installment] in a new era of Football Manager. This additional time has not been sufficient to ensure the game quality and experience [to meet] your expectations and our very high standards. In the previous blog [post,] 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.“

We’ll wrap up this bit with, “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.” That right there is the bit I want to highlight in this.

We got the announcement of the release date and a roadmap of several weeks, which sounds fine. However, given the four-month delay to the release which was already a further month away, that tells us that the reception to what little we have seen and what we know and the assessments on timelines weren’t linking up. If Sports Interactive can deliver on its own words in this press release, then great, but the studio needs to deliver on every word now.

As the press release notes, “FM25 is the biggest technical and visual advancement in the series for a generation. We simply cannot compromise the delivery of this crucial juncture in Football Manager’s history by rushing to release it in November.” The adage misattributed to Miyamoto is that a rushed game is forever bad, but a delayed game is eventually good. I might have mangled that up a bit, but it is a quote often misattributed anyway, who cares?

Despite the delay and online comments demanding the game be binned off for the 2026 release next year with a further update to Football Manager 2024, development and update cycles aren’t as easy in the blink of an eye. The announcement of the release date a week before this delay is stupid and quite frankly should be called what it is. If the delay is due to fan reaction to screenshots we’ve seen so far, then maybe that should have been shown before the release date announcement. A testing of waters, if you will.

How this was handled is a disaster and now it leads to a studio (speculatively) scrambling to redo/fix some of the work already done and polish up a title for mid-late March 2025. Though speaking of the release in more specifics, there was a glimmer of something a lot of people seemed to be highlighting before this announcement, and in fact, following the last one. Where is the beta/early access release?

The press release goes on to say, “Something you noted as missing from our announcement on 30 September was mention of Advanced Access on PC/Mac. We can confirm Advanced Access will be available ahead of the new release date and, when we are confident on how long that period will be, we will update you at the first opportunity. The new gameplay reveal will also now move to the end of January 2025.” Then it is back to boilerplate “We are intensely aware that this will be massively disappointing for you…” blah, blah, blah.

As I say, I’m more cautiously optimistic than most because I’m willing to give a studio that is willing to delay a game the time than a studio that I know is releasing a mess. Will FM25 still have teething problems with the new engine? Probably, and that’s to be expected. As long as it isn’t Cyberpunk 2077 levels of a buggy, uncontrollable, mess; as long as it isn’t as feature-complete as No Man’s Sky on launch, I think I’m willing to give the new launch a chance to disappoint me itself instead of jumping on an internet hate-bandwagon.