Sega and developer Sports Interactive have announced a Football Manager 25 delay, with the management sim now due to launch for PC and consoles in March next year.
In a blog post explaining the delay, Sports Interactive says that the additional development time it afforded itself back in September “has not been sufficient” to ensure the game “meets your expectations and our very high standards”.
The studio puts the delay down to a “difficult development cycle”, with many parts of Football Manager 25‘s creation “moving slower than we had predicted”, although the dev says that’s not the team’s fault.
Sports Interactive goes on to say that the timeline for FM25‘s development was “already tight”, and that the developer was “simply rushing too much and in danger of compromising our usual standards”.
The studio concludes that it’s too risky to rush Football Manager 25 to release in November, and so the game will now be launching in March instead. Advanced Access will still be available ahead of the new release date.
This delay announcement is pretty noteworthy given that the Football Manager 25 release date was only announced last week, raising questions about how a game can be delayed less than two weeks after its release date was revealed.
Judging by some of the replies on Football Manager‘s official X (formerly Twitter) account, fans aren’t happy with the delay, either. Many suggest that the release of Football Manager 25 is now effectively irrelevant, given that it will launch just two months or so before the end of the season.
Football Manager 25 is the latest game in the Football Manager series of football (sorry, I’m British, so it’s not “soccer” to me) management sims.
The game will feature a number of improvements over Football Manager 24, including a license for the English Premier League for the first time in series history, although it will also lack Create-a-Club and other core series features.
We don’t know when the new Football Manager 25 release date is, but the game will be arriving some time in March next year. Until then, you can wishlist it on Steam or check it out on the PlayStation Store and Xbox Store if you wish.