It has been almost two years since a new edition of Football Manager hit the market.
That time has been filled by a blend of frustration, devastation and more recently, excitement. Sports Interactive, the game’s developers, are gearing up for their latest release, Football Manager 26, and the anticipation has been felt immediately. They posted a teaser video for their newest game on X in the afternoon of August 13. Within an hour, the video had received 25,000 likes and 1.4million views.
To get to that point, however, they have had to endure an “embarrassing” 12 months. Football Manager 25 was billed as the studio’s next big step but after two postponements, the title was cancelled in February 2025 — three months after it was initially set to release.
The Athletic met Miles Jacobson, Sports Interactive’s studio director, to find out what went wrong with their cancelled title and what to expect from the upcoming new release.
For those who may not spend countless hours of their lives being a virtual football manager, Football Manager (or FM) has been part of the sports video games ecosystem since 1992. The game allows players to take charge of a football club, whether it be in the English Premier League or in the Japan Football League.
Created by the Collyer Brothers, Paul and Oliver, who also founded Sports Interactive, it was called Championship Manager. Rebranded as Football Manager early in 2004 following Sports Interactive’s split with previous publishers Eidos Interactive.
The game has been released annually since then, but without a release for the 2024-25 season, 19.2million people ended up playing Football Manager 2024 for longer than intended.
“I feel the need to apologise to our community for not delivering last year,” Jacobson tells The Athletic. “We’ve become a big part of people’s lives. We understand that and the responsibility that we have for people using our game to escape.
“It’s important. But pulling the game last year was absolutely the right thing to do.”
For Jacobson, the decision to cancel FM25 came just before Christmas. He received a build of the game and was going to spend a few days playing it before coming back from his break with notes.
The 54-year-old, who has been at Sports Interactive for over 25 years, quite quickly came to the realisation that features were missing from the build. He cites the inability to find his youth squad before adding, “I literally sat there and just couldn’t find things in my own game. It was pretty embarrassing. It was within an hour that I sat there and thought: ‘We can’t release’.”
By this point, the game had already been delayed twice, with signs that postponements would be necessary months prior. A development update for FM25 was published on September 4, 2024, which had a dedicated ‘revising our timelines’ subsection as a result of three curveballs coming Sports Interactive’s way just hours before.
The first of these was a result of collective human error, as multiple people forgot about a bug-fixing process that is necessary to publish a game.
Jacobson says “that’s completely on us,” before adding, “The second curveball was a legal issue, but with all legal issues, you can never really say what happened. It was an email that came into Sega’s (Football Manager’s publisher) legal team that day that was definitely going to cause a delay in the release.”
He could not go into the issue of the third unexpected development, but postponement talks started that day. There was a realisation that it would be an uphill battle to release FM25 on time, and Jacobson says he could not have justified people spending £50 on what would be released during a cost-of-living crisis.
Miles Jacobson, right, is the studio director of Sports Interactive (Alex Livesey – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)
One of the obstacles Sports Interactive faced with FM25 was a switch to a new game engine called Unity — the mechanism around which everything else, including the game’s design and interface, is built.
This has happened before, with Championship Manager 4, the first version of the game to include a graphical 2D match engine, postponed from late 2002 to March 2003. That delay was at the back of the studio’s minds when this cancellation came along, but the size of the undertaking of this task in the 2020s was underestimated, even with just over two years of pre-production.
Jacobson uses the analogy of what it is like switching from Windows to a Mac for the first time when it comes to changing game engines. In short, it is like learning a new language and way of working overnight, but with added complexities.
“Working with Unity natively, you’re actually programming in a language called C# (or C Sharp), whereas historically, we’ve always programmed in C++,” he says. “We were then expecting it to take about two weeks to do all the work of converting the C++ code into C#. Some of it took two weeks, some of it took nine months.
“Whilst we’ve got some of the underlying code that drives the game, the whole user interface (UI) had to be written from scratch. The graphics all had to be redone. The database was restructured in certain areas. A lot of the code that was in C++ still needed work done to be able to be translated into C#, so there was definitely a lot more work than we were expecting, even though we’d done the pre-production stage.”
Jacobson is insistent that none of the blame should be on Unity in light of this.
The process of choosing the American-developed game engine as Football Manager’s new system was named ‘Project Dragonfly’. It was a collective effort to assess different options on their graphical quality, workload for artists and programmers, and whether they could be used to build the game’s UI. Unity came out on top. “I completely support the team on that decision and still believe it was the right decision,” Jacobson insists.
“With future games, we’ll still be optimising everything in regard to the game engine, but that heavy lifting is done now.”
The cancellation of FM25 was revealed when Sega Sammy, the holding company that owns Japanese video game company Sega, released its Q3 financial results presentation for the year ending March 2025. Immediately following the news, included as part of its Q3 results, SegaSammy’s stock price dropped by 3.89 per cent.
“Financially, it was a disaster,” Jacobson says. “When you’re used to releasing a game every year, we lost the revenue from every single sale that we believed that we would make. It’s more the revenue that was affected than the costs. The costs weren’t looking great but people were still going out and buying the previous games. There was still some money coming in, but it was nowhere near what was normally coming in.”
In reality, there were three options for Sega and Sports Interactive: release the game anyway, look at alternative dates like May or June — which did not make sense with the football season ending — or think of the long-term impact rather than short-term gains.
Football Manager sponsor Brighton & Hove Albion (Steve Bardens/Getty Images)
Jurgen Post, COO of Sega Europe’s West Studios, was one of Sport Interactive’s first port of calls, and Jacobson says: “He was more understanding than some of the finance people, but they’re doing their job, so I fully understand that.
“In the circumstances, Sega have been massively supportive. I don’t think I’ll be allowed to forget what happened, and I shouldn’t be either, but they understand that quality is important when it comes to releasing games. You can’t just put s*** in a box and expect it to sell.”
Jacobson cites the trust Sports Interactive have built with Sega by delivering annual games over the past 30 years for their understanding of this situation. If they hadn’t bounced back this year, he admits, “I would have been the first out of the door”, but with costs not impacted as much as revenues, nobody has left the studio as a result of the FM25 cancellation. Three people have departed the studio, but that was because of the consolidation of IT teams rather than cancellation-related layoffs.
Sports Interactive received criticism from some fans for their public silence aside from their announcements of the delays and subsequent cancellation of FM25.
On social media, their posts were either very matter-of-fact statements or confirmations that FM24 was still going to be available on certain platforms. Fans were desperate for updates about FM26, and Sports Interactive admitted they got their communication wrong at first and chose to talk when they believed it mattered.
“We’ve made lots of mistakes,” Jacobson says. “We own them all and I apologise for them all, but you can’t change the past.
“That’s another reason why we went quiet after we announced that the game’s cancelled. We wanted to go back when we’ve actually got something to talk about, not promise that we’re going to be delivering a game this year until we know that we are going to be delivering.
“In this world, you’ve got to shut the f*** up, otherwise people will take a tiny breadcrumb and turn it into a loaf of bread, particularly with the popularity of the game now. So, I’m sorry you’ve had to wait a while, but this is the right time to be talking about it.”
So, what of FM26?
“It’s not what FM25 was going to be, because that was a mistake,” Jacobson says. “There is a lot of FM25 in there. There’s also some more FM24 things in there than there were going to be and there are some things that we already had down for FM26 that are now in there.”
One aspect of the cancelled FM25 that has been deemed a mistake was the desire to move away from drastic changes to the game’s UI. In Football Manager’s June 2024 development update, they stated that they would be moving away from the email system that had been in the game for over a decade in favour of a ’tile and card’ system.
The idea was to replicate how communication in football works in the real world, but Sports Interactive found that the change just did not work in a video game. As a result, a decision was made to redesign and improve the old messaging systems to provide a necessary sense of familiarity.
“Whilst the game is a sequel, the best sequels always have nods back to their predecessors,” Jacobson adds. “We got rid of too many of them, trying to be too ambitious. It’s all well and good saying everything’s new, but we’ve been the best football management game in the market for 30 years — why would you throw all of that out? So we brought some of that familiarity back in.”
The introduction of women’s football was part of what was planned for FM25’s release and work on that has continued for the release of FM26.
At the time of writing, the number of countries and leagues in the game is in the low double figures, while over 35,000 women’s footballers have been rated ahead of their planned inclusion. When players set up the game, they can choose which leagues they want to have active, meaning men’s and women’s leagues can run side-by-side with each other, or players can just run male-only or female-only saves.
“We’re really proud,” Jacobson says. “We’re doing more in year one than any other video game has done in women’s football, full stop.
“Also, a massive thanks to EAFC, who have been really helpful throughout this whole process. In most of the areas where they’ve had exclusive licences in women’s football, they’ve actually agreed to carve us out so that we can have licences as well. We can’t thank them enough.”
Work on FM26 started in secret. While the decision to cancel FM25 had been communicated to Sega in early January, it was not allowed to be shared internally until the end of the month because of stock market rules. Initially, some of the design team began working on what they would do if they had more time, but were not allowed to ask why.
Once the announcement was made internally, the team were split into different hit squads. There were groups looking at the user interface and user experience of the game, another looking at transfers, a squad to fix the colour scheming, and others focused on more areas for improvement.
Asked when he felt happy with FM26, Jacobson says: “I describe it as we’ve been in a very, very long tunnel and we couldn’t see the light at the end of it. When the new messaging system went in, we went round the bend and we could see the light at the end.
“I don’t think any of us realised what a big part of it was, but that was the thing that made me be able to see the light, and it’s not just me — it’s a lot of people here.
“The mood change when that went in was huge, just huge. It was like: ‘Wow, we really do have a game again’.”
(Top photo: Sports Interactive)
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