It's been known for a while now that Football Manager 2025 would be a franchise reboot of sorts. Well, kind of. Football Manager 2024 was, at the time, the single best iteration of the classic FM gameplay loop, tools, and features. Now, with 2024 about to go away in lieu of an all-new 2025 build, we're looking at a fairly extreme break.

"What I don't want to do is be sitting here and be overhyping things," said Sports Interactive's Miles Jacobson in a recent Eurogamer interview. "FM 25 is: 'This is the next generation of Football Manager' - and this is the first chapter in the new book of Football Manager, and will get expanded on."

In a surprisingly frank and direct interview, SI's Studio Director explains what we ought to expect from FM25, and what we most certainly ought not to. Down below, we will, in turn, explain what that means for us, average FM fans.

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Why is Football Manager 2025 losing so many features?

To address the elephant in the room, yes, Football Manager 2025 is carving out a fair chunk of features and functionalities that we may have come to take for granted in prior franchise entries. We are, without dawdling at all, losing all of the following:

• social media UI
• data chalkboards
• Create-a-Club
• Challenge Mode
• Versus Mode
• Fantasy Draft
• in-game inbox
• touchline shouts
• international management

None of these will be available in Football Manager 2025. That's not to say these features won't be re-introduced later down the line via feature-updates and yearly improvements, but, for the time being, they are off. In some instances, like with the inbox for example, they are being replaced entirely (e.g. Portal UI) and massively improved in turn.

Still, it's a hard thing to chew on. Sports Interactive is doing away with some pretty big, important features that some people might've used as key value additions for the series as a whole. To that end, there's really no reason to fret as Sports Interactive has already clarified that Football Manager 2026 will return hugely improved versions of Create-a-Club, international management, and Challenge Mode. So, work is being done on those features, even if they're temporarily out of the limelight.

This makes perfect sense in the context of a quote from Jacobson: "If people are expecting FM24 plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, they're not going to be getting that with FM25." Fair enough, then. What are we getting with FM25?

How can this be a good thing?

The general gist of why Sports Interactive is changing things up so much is actually very simple, and Jacobson explains it perfectly: "It's not up to our standards, it didn't work the way that consumers thought it worked," he explained in the context of touchline shouts, specifically. "So when we're looking at that and going, well, do we port something across from our old game that isn't good enough? The answer is 'no'," he said.

Quite simply, Football Manager has amassed such a huge roster of features and functionality over its tenure that the developer could no longer keep up with all of them at a satisfying pace.

"The team at Sports Interactive couldn't be working harder, they've been doing an absolutely incredible job, but we've had to look at scope maybe more than we thought we were going to have to last year," said Jacobson. "We've still got that premise of: if we had our time again, would we do it differently? And we've got the premise of: if we had our time again, would we do it at all?"

By focusing their attention on more specific, mission-critical aspects of Football Manager and foregoing the things that aren't quite make-it-or-break-it as that, Sports Interactive can dedicate more time to the stuff that matters. The core gameplay loop is, as per Jacobson's comments, still much the same. It's just a bit more fleshed out, more engaging, and more meaningfully interactive. That wouldn't have been possible without a re-focusing for the whole dev-team.

Football Manager has needed a clean break for years now, and this is it!

The fact that Football Manager 2025 marks the shaky first steps on a whole new game engine - Unity - is a huge deal, too. This comes with its own caveats, naturally, and we'll simply need to wait and see how that all pans out. On top of these, though, Sports Interactive has made sure that there are meaningful, important upgrades available where they matter the most.

The Portal UI, for one, is a hugely impressive piece of kit that gives you more information than we ever really had access to at once in FMs prior. However, don't forget that we're getting Premier League licensing for the first time ever, with the implication that there's lots more where that came from: "A huge effort has gone in over a very long amount of time," Jacobson told Eurogamer. "but yeah, delighted to have that one - and it's not the only new licence that we have for FM25."

Remember, too, that Football Manager 2025 is the first time we'll be able to manage both men's and women's football leagues all at once. It's the dream coming true, one hard-earned step at a time: a complete, unified, and comprehensive library of interactive football goodness.

By gosh, if that means we've got to break a few eggs along the way, shouldn't we be praising Sports Interactive for their efforts?

Are we all ready for a truly, genuinely new Football Manager? Let's find out with FM25

"Everybody says that they want change, right," said Jacobson. "People are kind of scared of it at the same time and, when change happens, will sometimes react to it negatively just because it's not what they know. So, 'we want change' and then you deliver change, and then, 'well we didn't want this much change!'"

There is, most obviously, an air of uncertainty over the release of this year's Football Manager. For the first time in years -nay- decades we're seeing a huge break from those bits that came before in lieu of a bright and hopeful future.

"It's been a difficult year. I'll say that over and over and over again," said Jacobson, concluding his interview. "It's been a great learning experience!"

We'll raise a glass to that, for sure. Football Manager 2025 represents something genuinely novel and exciting that might miff some people before all is said and done. Yet, the franchise's long-term prospects are now better than ever before, and we can't wait to see how the game plays in practice.

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