Cancelling Football Manager 25 Was Embarrassing, But Necessary

Football Manager 25 was conceived with significant ambition: it was meant to maintain the series' annual release schedule while simultaneously integrating a radical change like the switch to a new graphics engine, Unity, with all the associated challenges. However, its developer, the British studio Sports Interactive, realized they had bitten off more than they could chew and decided first to postpone, then cancel the project definitively.

A Release That Would Have Caused Permanent Damage

Miles Jacobson, studio director at Sports Interactive, spoke again about Football Manager 25 to BBC. Jacobson admits that the cancellation was "embarrassing", but things went wrong and he was not happy with the quality of the product. If Football Manager 25 had been released in that state, it would not have been worth the money players spent, and the move would have permanently damaged Sports Interactive.

It was the most expensive decision ever made by Sports Interactive, which was forced to follow a specific procedure to announce the cancellation, due to stock market requirements (Sports Interactive itself is not publicly traded, but its parent company Sega is). The series thus ended up skipping a year, but will soon return to our screens with Football Manager 26.