Football Manager 2025 Delayed

Sports Interactive published today what will likely be the final development update for Football Manager 25. They shared further FM25 development decisions, as well as some alterations to the timeline calendar for the months ahead.

Timeline Shift

They previously stated that they would be confirming FM25’s release date at the beginning of September with pre-orders starting at the same time, closely followed by the gameplay rollout period.

The FM 2025 development cycle has been challenging for the team though. As a result, they've had to shift the official announcement of FM25 to the end of September. The gameplay focus period will follow soon thereafter.

In addition, FM25 target launch date is now scheduled for late November, rather than the usual early November slot.

International Management

Moving the entire game to the Unity engine has proved trickier than originally anticipated. The challenges encountered in the development process led to another difficult decision around game content: international management will not be a playable mode in FM25, FM25 Console or FM25 Touch.

The developers chose to allocate the resources to other key areas instead of the international management module because it wouldn't be possible to deliver what they were originally planning in terms of quality without delaying the game release further.

International management will remain playable on FM25 Mobile as that’s on a different development track and codebase. For all other versions, international management will return in a much more feature-rich way to FM26, FM26 Console and FM26 Touch as part of the base game.

Weight Removed

On a side note, weight will no longer be shown on player profiles which is part of the direction of being able to move seamlessly between managing men’s and women’s clubs and vice-versa in one world.

The reason is that while the weight of male athletes can change a bit month to month, women’s body types are very different from men’s and their weight fluctuates a lot more, often weekly.


While the delay in the timeline is definitely a bit disappointing, remember that FM25 is just the starting point for what is a very exciting, long-term project.

It's going to be the first instalment in a new era for the game, one that will give a lot more possibilities compared to what was possible with the previous chapter.