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The last few weeks have been a rollercoaster for us Football Manager fans. First, the game was delayed a bit. That’s no big deal, I’m happy to wait for a better game after all. Then the announcement trailer – featuring the release date and not much else – dropped, and fans were understandably a bit miffed at being asked to pre-order a game that they’ve not seen any gameplay of yet. Now to finish off this unholy trinity, Sports Interactive has delayed Football Manager 25 until March. That’s right, not another few weeks, but March. Of course, while this is not the news we all were hoping for, unfortunately, I think it’s a necessary evil because this launch has been a mess.
FM25 is, by SI’s own measure, supposed to herald a new era for Football Manager. The game is moving to the Unity engine, which will bring the game into the modern age, offering a huge update in graphics and visuals that simply wasn’t possible in the old engine. Additionally, the long-awaited addition of women’s football to the game was scheduled for this year, after having initially been slated for release in FM24. SI has bigged up FM25 for two years, and the way its release has been handled over the last few weeks has been extremely disappointing.
I’d like to take the opportunity to quickly say that I don’t blame the developers for this one jot. Most fans of the game know how hardworking the game’s developers are, and how genuinely passionate they are about the game, and I can’t imagine there’s any fan that’s as gutted about how this situation has unfolded as those developers. Instead, this feels far more like a failure of leadership.
At the time of writing, the FM25 announcement trailer was released a mere 10 days ago. In the space of less than two weeks, SI has gone from showing us the release date and asking players to cough up £40 to pre-order the game, to seemingly realising that the game is so far from ready that they need to delay it by four whole months – is it just me, or does something not quite add up there?
A trend has developed in gaming of studios overpromising with their games to build hype, before releasing an unfinished project and being forced to patch it up to code in the following months. To SI’s credit, apologising to the fans and delaying the game until March is the correct thing to do, as we’d rather have a quality game than be forced to fork out for a messy update to a game we effectively already own, but unfortunately, the way the studio has handled this has dealt a huge blow to its reputation with players.
What is actually the case is often much less important to people than what appears to be the case, and by failing to clue players in on the status of the game thus far, SI has given fans free rein over the last 10 days to wildly speculate as to how development is coming along. The perception of many on X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit is that the move to the new engine has gone badly, the game doesn’t look or run as well as it was promised to, and SI is attempting to blag some cash via pre-orders without having to show players any gameplay.
Instituting such a massive delay in the aftermath of all this criticism will feel to many like an admission of guilt, whether or not these conspiracies are true. The prevailing opinion now will be that SI knew the game wasn’t good enough to show to players and that it wouldn’t be ready in time, but attempted to drum up sales anyway in the hope that they could get something half-decent out by the end of November. Following the backlash in response to the announcement trailer, perhaps they realised that fans were simply not going to put up with a half-finished game after having been promised so much, and were forced to backtrack, pushing the release date back to March. Again, I’m not saying this is true, nor do I entirely believe that it is, but it’s hard not to view it through this lens, and this will undoubtedly be the opinion of large swathes of the fanbase.
I mentioned in a previous piece that I believe in the developers, and I believe in FM25. This is an incredibly talented team and I am 100% confident that they will come through and deliver a truly great game when the time comes. But while my trust in the developers themselves is as rock-solid as ever, my trust in Sports Interactive as a studio is not. FM25 should have been delayed before the announcement trailer dropped, but having failed that, the second best time to delay it is now, but it’s going to take more than that to win back the players’ trust.
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