Football Manager 2025’s cancellation hurts, but we all know it’s the right move

Football Manager 2025 is cancelled. It’s dead, but not quite buried. While technically unannounced, the inevitable Football Manager 2026 will be built upon the bones of the huge technological improvements of its cancelled predecessor. 

After months of silence following the original delay, Sports interactive finally confirmed that FM25 is dead. At this point, it felt inevitable, we all knew it was coming, and it’s probably the best possible choice SI could actually make. 

Football Manager 2025’s cancellation is only bad for the devs 

As FM players, we spent hundreds — sorry, thousands — of hours playing through every annual release. Scouting forgotten wonderkids, getting tricked by useless attributes and trying to understand why this our star player is actually far worse than our two star player. Damn FM Star System.

As we proved just yesterday, the Football Manager community is incredibly stable. While we should be diving deep into a new game, player numbers on FM24 have barely dropped at all despite being out of date. For us, we can wait — and awesome mods that change the match engine for the better also help. 

However, the one party that does suffer in this cancellation is the team behind the game, Sports Interactive. This is a company built on a structure of annual releases who is missing out on an entire year of new game sale revenue. Cancelling FM25 was a huge move for the studio, and one that protects only the players. Us. 

In the cancellation announcement, SI explained that they could’ve released FM25 and fix it later. In other games, we see that a lot. Every Ubisoft game launches with game breaking bugs. Hell, remember Bethesda’s Starfield? That was rough. But Sports Interactive isn’t about that, the team doesn’t want to stain a series beloved by players and even real-life football managers. 

“We could have pressed on, released FM25 in its current state, and fixed things down the line,” the team explained. “But that’s not the right thing to do.” 

The boat had sailed 

For an annual release, it’s pretty important for Football Manager to coincide with the current season, and FM25’s delay until March was stretching that very thin. With a March release, FM26 would’ve released less than a year after and we’d be expected to buy two games in less than 12 months. 

We were all worried about this reality. Nobody wants to shell out full price for a game that’s technically useless before the year is over. With this in mind, even releasing a new Football Manager in March was a stretch, and it seems that SI became very aware of that. 

“We 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 “ the developers explained. 

Honestly, everything lines up – it all makes sense, and straight-up cancelling Football Manager 25 was really the only possible step forward at this point. It makes everyone’s lives harder, that’s for sure, and Football Manager 26 has even more pressure to deliver, but it’s also exciting. 

A polished launch? 

With FM25 now cancelled, FM26 will have one of the series’  longest development cycles ever. The scrapped game had already teased the greatest “technical and visual leap” in the series, but with extra time to deliver it might actually be polished as well. 

The more time Sports Interactive has to build these foundations for the future of the series, the more stable the series can be. This is incredibly exciting, and I’m excited to see just how far FM can jump.