Why was Football Manager 2025 cancelled? What went fallacious from large overhaul to imaginative and prescient

Football Manager 2025 has been cancelled after a series of delays, leaving fans disappointed — here’s all we know about what went wrong with this year’s ambitious game

Football game fans woke up to some disappointing news this morning after Sports Interactive, developer of the long-running Football Manager series, announced that last year’s game, Football Manager 2025, had been cancelled.

Wait, last year? Yep – despite running like clockwork for literal decades, Sports Interactive decided to delay last year’s game into the 2025 calendar year but has now cancelled it completely.

The title, which was to be the first on a new game engine, will now be eligible for refunds if you’ve pre-ordered it, but how did we get here? Here’s all we know.

Why was Football Manager 2025 cancelled?

Some in the Football Manager community had speculated the game was in trouble after Sports Interactive promised an update in January but one wasn’t forthcoming.

The Daily Star reached out to SEGA on January 31 and was told that the publisher had “nothing to share at this point”, a week prior to the cancellation announcement.

SEGA, Sports Interactive’s parent company and publisher of the Football Manager series, is a publicly traded company, and Sports Interactive’s lengthy statement says that the delay in the announcement was due to “Due to stakeholder compliance, including legal and financial regulations, today was the earliest date that we could issue this statement.”

The “challenging” development cycle appears to be tied to the switch to a new game engine in Unity. Last Summer, a blog post from SI boss Miles Jacobson said “Moving to the Unity engine is a huge undertaking.

“It gives us incredible building blocks to create new foundations, unlock our potential, and power our future vision for Football Manager, with enhanced graphical fidelity and more efficient development processes. In the future and with more experience, it will lead to faster creation and implementation of game features and design-led tweaks.”

The move seemingly has one eye on the future of the franchise, and would have seen a significant overhaul to Football Manager’s visuals, while still being able to import Football Manager 24 saves into the game, offer better animations, and finally introduce the Women’s game.

Here’s hoping those features come to Football Manager 26, especially since FM25 would have been the first entry with the Premier League license.

Down in the dumps? There’s a way you can play Football Manager 2025 now — sort of.

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