Sega and Sports Interactive were right to cancel Football Manager 25
If you read this blog regularly, you’ll likely agree that the games industry in 2025 is a Wild West of anti-consumer practices. Developers and publishers seem set on milking as much money from customers as possible, regardless of the damage done to beloved series or the reputations of the companies themselves.
One unfortunate habit studios have developed is to release horribly broken games. Even if a title is obviously unfit for public consumption, they prefer to rake in gamers’ hard-earned cash now and worry about fixing the mess in later patches. Think Cyberpunk 2077, Star Wars Outlaws, or Cities: Skylines 2.
Therefore the easy option would have been for Sega and Sports Interactive to sand off Football Manager 25’s rough edges and release it, and we should praise them for cancelling this year’s edition in favour of maintaining the series’ quality.
That’s not to say that they handled the situation perfectly. Right up until the game’s original November 2024 release date was delayed in October, Sports Interactive was happy to promote preorders to gamers who had no reason to suspect they wouldn’t get their hands on the game the following month.
When the delay did come, Football Manager 25 was pushed to March - just two months before the end of the European football season, at which point much of the content fans pay the annual RRP for would be outdated. While it would have been drastic, it might have been better then to scrap the game altogether.
And there’s not much they could have done about it given the requirement to sync the news with their Japanese owners’ financial reporting, but some gamers felt let down when FM25’s eventual cancellation was announced at 2:30am UK time on a random February morning. Luckily, it quickly became clear that many players don’t follow regular sleep schedules, but it still felt like odd timing.
However, even if some of the comms were mishandled, the fact remains that FM25’s cursed timeline remains better than the alternative: releasing a sub-standard entry in a 20 year-old series (even older, spiritually), likely with a shaky Unity match engine and stripped of international management modes.
And it would have been so easy to do. Football Manager has a passionate player base of fans and content creators who by the end of each annual cycle are ravenous for new features and updated rosters. Even with critical reviews, FM25 would have made a heap of cash for Sports Interactive and Sega.
So for that, I applaud them. Their dedication to their players and the quality of their output is obviously strong enough that they would rather take a financial hit than release a sub-par product, and while parts of the internet will no doubt criticise them for it, that puts them ahead of most modern studios in my eyes.
