Football Manager 25 canceled in a refreshing show of concern for quality

There are only two licensed professional sports games included in Wikipedia’s “List of video games notable for negative reception.” Do not be fooled, however: WWE 2K20 and eFootball 2022 are just the outliers, arriving so poorly crafted as to cause notable outcry and an actual change to development plans. Most licensed professional sports games come out yearly, whether fully baked, notably improved, or not, and fans who have few other options to play with their favorite intellectual property learn to make do with them.

Not so with fans of Football Manager, a series that can be traced back in some form to 1992 that has released a game almost every year, minus one ownership shift in the early 2000s. Sports Interactive, the company behind the franchise, released a statement on Thursday (in British time) that says that “following extensive internal discussions and careful consideration,” Football Manager 25 is canceled. The game was “too far away from the standards you deserve,” so they are focusing on the 2026 version.

Trying not to make “the same bloody game every year”

Football Manager 2025 was already delayed twice and is now quite late—as we are now midway into the European football (or what Americans call soccer) season. The game was intended to be a major overhaul.

Miles Jacobson, head of developer Sports Interactive, told Eurogamer last fall that the 2025 version was the “first chapter in the new book of Football Manager.” Lots of existing modes would be tossed out, including international management and “touchline shouts,” or phrases you can yell or calmly administer to your team during the matches you don’t actually control. The game was moving from a proprietary engine to Unity. The team reimagined and redesigned more than 500 screens full of data. Perhaps most importantly, 2025 was the year the franchise landed the official license for the Premier League.

With all that, there have been a lot of scope changes. “I’ve de-scoped something today,” Jacobson told Eurogamer in September, “that at the time of the [June] dev blog was still in scope. And we re-scoped something last week, and we up-scoped something last week—it’s a very fluid process!” The reason for these changes? “It’s our ambition,” Jacobson said then. “I know that some people will find that difficult to believe because, ‘Oh, they only work on iterations, they’re making the same bloody game every year.'”