Football Manager 25 cancellation explained: Why? Financial impact? What about content creators?

New York Times

12-02-2025

Football Manager 25 has been cancelled.
FM25 was initially slated for release in early November 2025 but was delayed twice. First, the release date was pushed to later that month but, after further complications, it was postponed until March. Last Friday, Sports Interactive — the game's developer — released a statement confirming there would be no new game this season.
Advertisement
The cancellation is significant news for Sports Interactive and Sega, FM's publisher, and the millions of fans who play the game, as well as its strong community of content creators on YouTube and streaming websites.
Here, The Athletic examines what happened and how it will affect the community.
At 2:30am GMT on Friday, Sega Sammy, the holding company that owns Japanese video game company Sega, released its Q3 financial results presentation for the year ending March 2025, revealing FM25 would not be released. A statement said the game had been cancelled because the company needed more time to renew the user interface and graphics and that 'development assets' would be taken over by the next edition.
Sports Interactive also released a statement on the Football Manager website and its social channels explaining how it ran out of time to deliver a game to the standards it expects: 'Due to a variety of challenges that we've been open about, and many more unforeseen, we haven't achieved what we set out to do in enough areas of the game, despite the phenomenal efforts of our team. Each decision to delay the release was made to get the game closer to the desired level but, as we approached critical milestones at the turn of the year, it became clear that we would not achieve the standard required, even with the adjusted timeline.'
There was also a suggestion that the game would not look and perform to an appropriate level if released in March.
'Many areas of the game have hit our targets but the overarching player experience and interface are not where we need them to be. Extensive evaluations, including consumer playtesting, have demonstrated we have clear validation for the new direction of the game and are getting close — but we're too far away from the standards you deserve.'
Alarm bells began ringing in early September when Sports Interactive announced that it had pushed back its initial release date from early November to later that month.
A few weeks later, Sports Interactive released a statement delaying the game until March, citing continued issues ensuring 'the game quality and experience' was up to standard.
Advertisement
'Timelines were already tight and, as rightly pointed out by many of your recent comments, we were rushing too much and in danger of compromising our usual standards. This has put enormous pressure on everyone working across the studio, who are all passionately committed to delivering the best game possible.
'FM25 is the series' biggest technical and visual advancement for a generation. We cannot compromise the delivery of this crucial juncture in Football Manager's history by rushing to release it in November.'
As part of that October statement, Sports Interactive stated there would be a gameplay reveal in late January 2025. This did not happen.
Football Manager has used an in-house developed game engine since its first edition under its current name in 2004.
A game engine is the mechanism around which everything else, including design and interface, is built. After almost two decades, Sports Interactive's head, Miles Jacobson, announced in 2023 that the company had assembled a team to find an external engine to help future-proof the franchise.
'My understanding was that the game was built on the same technology for 20-plus years, and they needed to make a change,' Ciaran Brennan, Sports Interactive's former communications director, tells The Athletic. 'They evaluated a few different engines and decided to go with Unity.'
Unity is a big player in the game engine business. It was first released in 2005 and is the engine used for hundreds of mobile and desktop games, including Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout and the popular Cities Skylines series. Jacobson and Sports Interactive saw it as a necessary switch that could improve the game's graphics and overall performance while also protecting the franchise's long-term future.
Advertisement
FM25 was among the company's most anticipated releases. However, switching game engines is not a straightforward process and Sports Interactive said it had encountered 'unforeseen' challenges in the game's development, many related to the various technical differences of incorporating decades of data.
'Changing technology and porting a product while trying to ship a new version is always going to be a challenge,' said a video game executive with experience working with Unity, speaking to The Athletic on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, after the second delay announcement in October 2024. 'Porting from a custom engine to Unity will have its challenges. There is no magic button that converts all your code, libraries and art. There are different rules, file formats and ratios. Often, that mountain of work is underestimated.
'In the long run, Unity will provide many advantages as engine development is, in practice, outsourced, but switching is painful. Game code, assets and libraries aren't a one-to-one fit. So many, if not all, things need to be rebuilt from scratch. That job always looks much more straightforward than what ends up being the reality.'
Football Manager is a titan within the football video game industry. Football Manager 2024 — released in late 2023 — had 14million players across its desktop and mobile versions worldwide. Sports Interactive's revenues were worth more than £65million ($82m) in the financial year ending March 2023, according to Companies House. FM25 was advertised as the most revolutionary for a generation.
'Football Manager is as iconic as games get, inspiring fierce devotion and mania in a generation of football fans who were sure they could do a better job than their team's real-world counterpart, and — most importantly — influencing the trajectory of real-world football,' says Daniel Dawkins, content director at Future Games Show and former editor in chief at GamesRadar+.
'Football has never been more data-driven, and there are multiple tales of clubs using the famously exhaustive Football Manager player database to scout players. Thanks to FM 2005, I had a molecular knowledge of the Japanese league's top wingers way before (Brighton owner) Tony Bloom was unearthing Kaoru Mitoma.'
Yes, under a previous guise. Championship Manager 4, the franchise's name before splitting from previous publisher Eidos and continuing under a different title with Sega, was scheduled to be released in late 2002 but was delayed until March 2003.
Like FM25, Championship Manager 4 was a significant release for the franchise, as it was the first title to introduce a graphical 2D match engine.
Advertisement
At the time, Sports Interactive issued a statement saying the delay was because its developers needed 'time to tune the game and make more refinements'. When it was released on March 28, CM4 became the UK's fastest-selling PC game of all time and won several awards. However, some players complained about 'bugs' — errors that disrupted the game's function.
While it has been more than two decades since the release of a Football Manager or Championship Manager game has been postponed, delays are not uncommon in the industry.
'For Football Manager, (the delay is) a big deal. For video games, not so much,' says Dawkins. 'Big game delays are increasingly common. Ubisoft's upcoming action-adventure Assassin's Creed Shadows has been delayed twice (originally due on November 24, then bumped to February 14, 2025, and now March 20), to name just one high-profile example.
'Why? Games have never been more complex to create with teams of 500-plus developers, often working across multiple global studios. (They're) longer — the average single-player blockbuster is more than 50 hours and more financially make or break. Missing sales targets can be enough to close a studio.'
In 2021, Jacobson said he wanted to incorporate women's football into Football Manager and FM25 was set to be the first edition with its inclusion.
A team of analysts and scouts led by head women's football researcher Tina Keech began building a database with records starting in 2001. The database was being built from scratch, the first time they had to do this in decades. According to Forbes, the developers now have records for players from more than 4,000 women's clubs.
Football Manager is Sports Interactive's most prominent title by a large margin and its main financial driver. Based on the company's £65m-plus revenues, the cancelled release of FM25 will result in millions of pounds worth of unrealised revenue.
However, a 'buggy' release can cause long-term reputational harm to a franchise, so sidelining FM25 to ensure FM26 is up to standard may be the best long-term decision.
'CD Projekt's highly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 was released in late 2020 in a buggy and incomplete state, with the resulting backlash wiping 75 per cent off its developer's market value,' says Dawkins. 'Cyberpunk 2077 was patched multiple times, and the company's fortunes have now recovered, but few high-profile releases have dared to launch in such a fashion since.
Advertisement
'The flip side of that tale is that they did patch that game and rehabilitate its reputation, with the share growing three times from its lowest ebb. Ubisoft's share price recently dipped 10 to 20 per cent on the back of the Assassin's Creed Shadows delay, but that game has a disproportionate importance to that publisher's portfolio, which faces many wider challenges.
'To be clear: while Sports Interactive will have disappointed fans, I commend their decision. As the Cyberpunk example shows, it's hard to come back from a buggy launch, at least not within a truncated annual release cycle.'
Sega is a huge multi-enterprise corporation with successful titles across various entertainment sectors, so the cancelled release of Football Manager will not have huge repercussions on its overall finances. For example, it owns the intellectual property for the recent cinema box-office hit Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which made $463.7m globally against a production budget of $122m, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Still, the cancellation made a noticeable impact on the company's listing on the Japanese stock exchange. Immediately following the news, included as part of its Q3 results, SegaSammy's stock price dropped by 3.89 per cent. Sega's overall revenues fell by eight per cent for the nine months ending December 31, 2024.
Naturally, news that one of the most-anticipated editions in the franchise's history has been cancelled is frustrating for many Football Manager fans.
In the meantime, modding communities have taken the reins to build updated versions of FM24, bringing squads and leagues in line with the present. Hours after the news of the cancellation, for example, Football Manager community website FMScout released an update to its 2024-25 downloadable content pack for FM24.
'This is almost certainly great news for the ever-flexible and highly reactive modding community,' says Dawkins. 'FM is relatively easy to mod, and this could bridge the gap from FM24 to FM26.'
Advertisement
It is more devastating for FM's growing content creator community on YouTube and streaming websites, such as Twitch, as no new edition hurts their viewership and, in turn, their pockets.
Many creators have left their previous jobs to make videos and stream online full time. FM25's initial delayed release date in March resulted in a significant decrease in viewership during the launch season, typically the most profitable time for creators as interest is highest. With FM25's cancellation, these creators will not benefit from the upturn in attention for its release.
'I looked at the numbers, and there not being a new game has probably cost me around £25,000,' Jack Peachman, who operates the WorkTheSpace YouTube and Twitch channels, tells The Athletic. 'When I quit my job four and a half years ago, it was done with the presumption there'd be a Football Manager game every year.
'Football Manager coincides with Christmas when ad rates are at their highest. (The release) is typically a perfect storm, with probably 30 per cent of my annual income earned in the two months before Christmas. I didn't get that bump in interest this year. Fortunately, I have built a community of consistent viewers, but you don't get that broader mainstream.'
Sports Interactive has yet to announce FM26, but the confirmation statement explained that part of why it cancelled FM25 was to prevent the release of two games in close succession.
'We could have pressed on, released FM25 in its current state, and fixed things down the line — but that's not the right thing to do. We were also unwilling to go beyond a March release as it would be too late in the football season to expect players to then buy another game later in the year.'
If FM26 is released following the schedule of previous titles, fans can expect it to drop in early November.