Development Update: Football Manager 25

I want to begin this latest Football Manager 25 Development Update by thanking everyone who read our previous one in June.

We’ve been following the reaction and conversation and look forward to addressing many of your comments and observations when we start our FM25 gameplay rollout period.

In June’s blog, I revealed the first-ever FIFAe World Cup of Football Manager, which wrapped up this past weekend. I was very proud to be in Liverpool for the final couple of days of a fantastic four-day competition that I thought FIFAe did a fantastic job with; from production, the players, the broadcasting and all the content across socials - everything looked incredible in person and online. 

Seeing FM in the eSports domain was really exciting - and I hope those who attended the event, and those who watched and followed along online, agree. 

For me, it was pretty surreal and emotional to be sat in the audience and hear the way the presenters and pundits spoke about the life's work of the entire SI team – and the way what is primarily played as a solo experience came to life as an eSport.

Alongside the FIFAe team, we will digest and evaluate the tournament in the coming weeks to see what learnings we can take and what the future entails for collaboration between us.

Congratulations to the winners, Ichsan Rahmat Taufiq and Budi Muhamad Manar from Indonesia – what an achievement.

Commiserations too to the runners-up Sven Goly and Tery Whenett from Germany, who were fantastic throughout the event. The standard of play from all 20 managers was incredibly high and underlines how truly global the FM community is. 

Our last Development Update gave you a picture of our world in June, and since then we've had to review some of the things previously mentioned. I want to take this opportunity as well to update you on some further FM25 development decisions we've made, as well as some alterations to our calendar for the months ahead. 

Revising our timelines

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

Firstly, we've had to shift the official announcement of FM25 to the end of September. The gameplay focus period will follow soon thereafter. Our target launch date has moved accordingly and is now scheduled for late November, rather than our usual early November slot.

The FM25 development cycle has been challenging for the whole team. We knew that moving the entire game to the Unity engine was going to be a complex endeavour. As we’ve gotten deeper into the process and gained learnings, it’s fair to say it’s been trickier than we originally anticipated. The entire dev team has been challenged in a myriad of new ways and are doing an incredible job in the process. I’m excited to eventually share our hard work with you but we need a little more time before we can do that. 

As I outlined in June’s blog, we’ve consistently held ourselves accountable to the same three core questions:

• Would we do it in the same way if we had our time again?
• Would we have done this at all?
• Do we have the time required to do this to the highest possible standard, in our first cycle of a new era?

The challenges we’ve encountered in the development process over the last couple of months have led us to make another difficult decision around game content: international management will not be a playable mode in FM25, FM25 Console or FM25 Touch. 

Coming off the back of a summer of tournament football and with this week even being an international break, we’ve looked really hard at international management in FM and determined that what we were planning to deliver wouldn’t reach our initial quality threshold. 

We also considered the available game data. Only 5.6% of all FM24 PC saves have used the mode, which we feel validates our view that we need to do much, much better with the experience. That number is even smaller on Console. 

So, rather than delay FM25 even further, we’ve paused work on that area of the game and allocated those resources to other key areas. It will continue to exist in FM25, FM25 Console and FM25 Touch as part of the wider simulation of world football, it just won’t be playable. 

However, international management will remain playable in 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 in what will be an exciting year for international football with the World Cup expanding to 48 teams. To be clear, this will return as part of the base game and not as any form of additional downloadable content. 

While difficult, these decisions are made for the good of the game and the majority of our players. We are determined to ensure that FM25, the first game in a new engine, is as good as it can be in the time we have. By pushing back FM25’s release date, we’ve given ourselves a few extra weeks of development time to try to deliver the best experience that we can for this first in the new era of Football Manager releases. 

In recent weeks, I have also taken steps to free up more of my time to focus solely on development and supporting the wider team. One of our core studio values is Consider the Bigger Picture, and what’s most important right now is focusing on FM25. I mentioned in June that I’d be speaking at the Unite conference in Barcelona as part of the keynote. While we will still have an FM presence there, I will not be making the trip because I need to concentrate all my efforts on directing FM25. It’s for this reason that I will also not be attending Tokyo Game Show, an event I loved last year and really helped make our first-ever release in Japan a big success.

I’ve also cancelled a trip to America which I was really looking forward to but the game, and you as the players of our games, are the bigger picture.  

An update to Player Profiles

When we begin our gameplay rollout, one of the areas I’m really looking forward to sharing is our work on Women’s Football. 

As you know, it’s been a long-term project for us and one of the biggest things we've done in recent times outside of the move to Unity. Throughout the process, we’ve been laser-focused on introducing Women’s Football to FM in the most authentic way possible. We've applied that thinking to everything we've done, as we generally do with all areas of design and development. From a gameplay perspective, being able to move seamlessly between managing men’s and women’s clubs and vice-versa in one world, one ecosystem was the number one priority - but that’s forced us to consider how various game world aspects are currently portrayed.

As such, we can now share a change we’ve made to all FM25 player profiles: a player’s weight will no longer be visible. 

Through the creation of our Women's Football database, we discovered 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. 

This perspective encouraged us to review the wider game, much like we have with all other areas, and we’ve ultimately decided to no longer show weight for any players in FM25. A very basic measurement will still be included under the hood, but it won’t be visible on the front end anymore.

Testing Update

We also announced in June that we would be welcoming FMFC members within a reasonable travel vicinity to come to our campus in London and help with playtesting the new UI/UX of FM25. We received an enormous response to that, and I want to thank everyone who has volunteered and given us their availability. The playtesting will still be going ahead but as a result of the above milestones moving, the start date is shifting slightly. FMFC members who have applied will be contacted shortly with further date options as we begin to finalise the process.

This should be my last development update until we start focusing more on what’s in FM25. We have lots of good stuff to show you that we’re excited about but I want to re-iterate that FM25 is the first instalment in a new era for the game, one that will give us a lot more possibilities than we had with the previous chapter.

FM25 is just the starting point for what is a very exciting, long-term project.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers, 

Miles