Football Manager 25 gets delayed to March 2025

Making it a rare sports game matching its title with the year of release

Sports Interactive / SEGA

Sports Interactive announced that the release date of Football Manager 25 has been delayed by five months, moving its launch to March 2025. The developer said that this decision was made following “discussions with SEGA, our licensors and partners.” The management sim was originally supposed to come out in November 2024.

Delaying the game became necessary due to FM25’s development not going as smoothly as hoped, the developer stated. 

“In our last Development Update in September, we explained that we needed to push FM25’s original release back to give ourselves more time to deliver the best possible experience for this first installment in a new era of Football Manager,” the studio wrote. “This additional time has not been sufficient to ensure the game quality and experience meets your expectations and our very high standards.”

Sports Interactive emphasized that it has been “a difficult development cycle” and “many things have been moving slower than we had predicted.”

“FM25 is the biggest technical and visual advancement in the series for a generation. We simply cannot compromise the delivery of this crucial juncture in Football Manager’s history by rushing to release it in November,” the developer continued. “Of course, this is not where any of us expected to be seven weeks out from our release but, in the spirit of our studio values, we always consider the bigger picture – and the bigger picture here is that we need this additional time to deliver a game that we can all be proud of.”

Sports Interactive stated that fans who pre-ordered the game and wished to refund it due to the extended waiting time should contact their retailer to do so. However, nothing will change where the bonuses for those who pre-order FM25 are concerned: There will be an early unlock period ahead of the official release and the studio will inform players of its exact duration as soon as it can.

Naturally, the planned gameplay reveal for FM25 has been pushed back as well – this is now set to happen in January 2025.

“We are intensely aware that this will be massively disappointing for you. We share that disappointment and are extremely sorry,” the studio concluded.