As you're surely aware by now, developer Sports Interactive has sadly had to outright cancel the postponed release of Football Manager 2025. That's right, folks: FM25 is no more, long live FM26. Because, yes, we do already know for a fact that Sports Interactive is simply moving on to next year's offering. Or possibly this year's offering, depending on how things go. We'll explain below!

If you're out of the loop, here we've summarized all the important information we have about Football Manager 2025's cancellation. Further, we're also extrapolating this info to get a sense of what this all might mean for the FM that's actually coming out. Let's see what we've got.

Why was FM25 cancelled?

First things first, then: the context. SEGA and Sports Interactive recently announced that "due to a variety of challenges that we've been open about to date, and many more unforeseen, [SI team] currently [hadn't] achieved what [they] set out to do in enough areas of the game, despite the phenomenal efforts of [their] team."

"Whilst many areas of the game have hit [SI's] targets, the overarching player experience and interface is not where [they] need it to be. As extensive evaluation has demonstrated, including consumer playtesting, [SI] have clear validation for the new direction of the game and are getting close - however, we're too far away from the standards [the community deserves]."

In other words, Sports Interactive simply wasn't able to deliver what it set out to deliver, and the situation was serious enough that SEGA greenlit a full-fledged cancellation of a franchise entry. Not a great look, for sure, but it's not a total wash at all.

As SI explains, the team "could have pressed on, released FM25 in its current state, and fixed things down the line." This, however, wasn't the favored approach to the matter at hand, and the risk of further losing community goodwill was too great. Instead, "every effort is now focused on ensuring that [SI's] next release achieves [their] goal and hits the quality level [they] all expect."

It's a double-edged situation, really, but the good news is that Football Manager is continuing. This really is just a temporary setback.

Another thing to take into account here is that Football Manager 2025 was now supposed to come out quite late in the season. Was FM26 then supposed to launch mere months after it? Or would the franchise releases all be postponed from that point onwards? It was a less than perfect solution, no matter how you flip it.

Is Football Manager 2026 even happening?

So, to reiterate: Football Manager 2026 / Football Manager 26 is still going to happen! The series isn't going anyway, it's just that Sports Interactive got stock between a rock and a hard place, and decided to call it quits for a single season.

Now, the curious bit to keep in mind comes from Sports Interactive's statement itself. Alongside the explanation as to why FM25 got cancelled, SI also stated that "[they] 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."

This gives us even more context on the planned release of FM26: we may want to expect a proper, full-fledged showcase sometime relatively soon. Not only is it obviously going to be a retrofit of FM25, but everything points to it releasing in October/November 2025! Do stay tuned on this front, of course, though we're willing to bet on this being the case in the end.

This is supported further by the fact that there will be no 2024/2025 seasonal update for FM24. It's exceedingly unlikely that SI would want to stay out of the limelight for years on end, and so we think this will be the only season we miss out on as far as Football Manager goes.

Football Manager (the franchise) is here to stay, but the Unity transition was more problematic than SI expected

It's painfully obvious by now that Sports Interactive didn't foresee this level of complexity when it comes to Football Manager's transition to Unity Engine. It's a hard problem to solve, for sure, because there's no way a baseline Unity build had the capacity to handle all of Football Manager's historical quirks, data handling, and - indeed - content.

The hope is that SI is now going to be able to use the next couple of months to produce a compelling and meaningful upgrade to the likes of Football Manager 2024. The flip side of the coin, however, is that now the expectations are even higher still.

Over the years, Sports Interactive has proven time and again that the team has the chutzpah necessary to keep one such franchise rolling. The growing pains they're experiencing here were, perhaps, just a matter of time. Certainly, it's a disappointment to see all of this unraveling, but SI learns from its mistakes, and we're excited to see what the next step will be.

Who knows, we might even see some gameplay ahead of Football Manager 2026 this time around!