Football Manager 2025: Setting Expectations Ahead of the Big Reveal

It's 2024, and with Football Manager 2025 due to release later this year, we're in for a whole lot of changes. For the first time in recent history, the FM developer Sports Interactive is preparing a huge engine-level shift for the franchise. And that, alone, is well worth the inevitable growing pains the latest version is bound to cause.

This is particularly interesting for veteran fans of Football Manager at large: if you want the best possible version of the legacy FM experience, you're going to want to get FM24, specifically. Sports Interactive plainly stated that Football Manager 2024 is going to be about as good as it gets for the legacy version of the game. Football Manager 2025, on the other hand, is taking things in a different direction.

"Football Manager 2024 will be the 20th game in Sports Interactive’s Football Manager series, and will be the last of its kind," said Sports Interactive ahead of FM24's release. That has come and gone, and now, we're off to strike goals on greener pastures.

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Why is Football Manager 2025 such a big deal?

"For many years now," Sports Interactive said in that very same announcement, "we have been planning the next revolution of Football Manager, something we haven’t claimed since the 3D engine first came into the series back in FM09." That's where the so-called Project Dragonfly comes into the picture.

Project Dragonfly has been the working title for Football Manager 2025 and beyond. Note that Project Dragonfly isn't the WIP title of a singular new FM entry: instead, it's the umbrella term referring to the totality of the franchise's future feature offerings, graphics and physics engines, expandability, and beyond. The whole tech stack, if you will.

Football Manager 2025 comes into the picture as the first proper realization of this promise, then. A "truer reflection of real-life football with new animation tech," as Sports Interactive put it back in 2023. Matchday experience, for one, is bound to be substantially improved by default thanks to the new engine, and since FM24 and FM25 were actually in active production simultaneously, this year's title has been given way more attention than you'd expect.

Before delving deeper into the technical nitty-gritty of the latest version, there's one more hugely important detail to share: "The FM25 cycle will also see the long-awaited introduction of women’s football to the Football Manager series," SI promised. A long-awaited promise indeed, and one we're very much looking forward to seeing in action!

What engine is FM25 going to use?

Football Manager 2025 is running on Unity Engine. A tried-and-true option for virtually every game genre under the sun, Unity lends itself particularly well to management and strategy games. Its flexibility and adaptiveness are what made the engine a perfect fit f or Project Dragonfly, even though Sports Interactive explored a variety of potential options.

"The switch to Unity is going to give us a lot more power graphically, across all formats, alongside powerful user interface tools," Sports Interactive said. "The switch to Unity means there is the possibility of better-quality graphics across all supported devices, however it should be expected that there will be some changes to the minimum spec requirements, which will be communicated ahead of FM25’s release."

In other words, FM25 will inevitably be less low-spec-friendly thanks to its substantially improved rendering pipeline. The user interface at large, too, should be much nicer and more useful, making the whole game that much more pleasant to look at. Add substantially improved animations into the mix, and you've got a generational bump-up in visuals: something that could only ever have been delivered by an engine-level switcheroo.

Can Football Manager 2025 reinvigorate the franchise?

Due to be revealed sometime in Q3 2024, Football Manager 2025 has got some really big shoes to fill. While Sports Interactive might've said some really promising things already about this latest version, the simple fact of the matter is that we've seen none of the things they've been promising so far.

There are two reasons why we're not worried, though. The first is the obvious one: Sports Interactive's pedigree and experience are undoubtedly going to help leverage the engine upgrades brought about by Project Firefly. The second important bit is one of the new features we do know about, and that is the save game transfer. You can read more about it in one of our prior articles, but the gist of it is that players will continue to be able to transfer their save games from FM24 into the next season.

This isn't something we expected to see, given how incredibly different the new title might end up being, but the feature's presence tells us that Sports Interactive is still very well aware of its fans' wishes. Keeping such massive quality-of-life features around showcases an understanding of what it's all about, and it's a promising sign of things to come.

A Necessary Sacrifice, with Dividends to Come

There are, naturally, some big question marks to take into account for Football Manager 2025 as well. A true sequel like we've not seen in almost a decade, since FM17, this year's title will inevitably change the core and the crux of the experience. For better? For worse? We just don't know yet!

The big question is whether Sports Interactive is delivering a substantially big push forward to warrant causing UX problems in the first place. Judging by what's been said so far, we do feel there wasn't any other way forward, as FM's current tech stack is simply too old to be worth keeping updated and upgraded for times to come.

Changes aren't always welcome, however. Especially for game franchises so established and entrenched as Football Manager. As Sports Interactive has been working on Project Dragonfly for quite a long while now, we feel confident in this brave new vision of FM. As for the specifics, Q2 is slowly coming to a wrap, so stay tuned - news is coming soon!

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