Football Manager 25 Touch udkommer 26. november til Switch

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.

In our last Development Update in September, we explained that we needed to push Football Manager 25‘s original release back to give ourselves more time to deliver the best possible experience for this first instalment in a new era of Football Manager. This additional time has not been sufficient to ensure the game quality and experience meets your expectations and our very high standards.

In the previous blog 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. 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.

Football Manager 25 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. Of course, this is not where any of us expected to be seven weeks out from our release but, in the spirit of our studio values, we always consider the bigger picture—and the bigger picture here is that we need this additional time to deliver a game that we can all be proud of.

For the large numbers of you who have already pre-ordered the game, we thank you very much for your trust and support. Given the delay, however, should you wish to claim a refund, please contact your retailer. Something you noted as missing from our announcement on September 30 was mention of Advanced Access on PC and 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.

We are intensely aware that this will be massively disappointing for you. We share that disappointment and are extremely sorry.

Thank you for reading and your patience. It means the world to us as we continue to work on creating a new era for Football Manager.

We know this will come as a huge disappointment, especially given that the release date has already moved twice, and you have been eagerly anticipating the first gameplay reveal. We can only apologise for the time it has taken to communicate this decision. Due to stakeholder compliance, including legal and financial regulations, today was the earliest date that we could issue this statement.

We have always prided ourselves on delivering the best value for money games that bring you countless hours of enjoyment, that feel worth every moment and every penny you spend. With the launch of FM25 we set out to create the biggest technical and visual advancement in the series for a generation, laying the building blocks for a new era.

Due to a variety of challenges that we’ve been open about to date, and many more unforeseen, we currently 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 with the aim of getting the game closer to the desired level but, as we approached critical milestones at the turn of the year, it became unmistakably clear that we would not achieve the standard required, even with the adjusted timeline.

Whilst many areas of the game have hit our targets, the overarching player experience and interface is not where we need it to be. As extensive evaluation has demonstrated, including consumer playtesting, we have clear validation for the new direction of the game and are getting close – however, we’re too far away from the standards you deserve.

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.

Through the cancellation, every effort is now focused on ensuring that our next release achieves our goal and hits the quality level we all expect. We will update you on how we are progressing with that as soon as we are able to do so.