After a year on the sidelines, Football Manager’s creators say the game will be back this year.
But the top boss behind the video game admits cancelling the 2025 edition was “embarrassing”.
Fans hoping to play FM25 were left disappointed when its was initially delayed last year, before being scrapped completely in February.
“Things went wrong” while the game was being developed, Miles Jacobson tells My Newspaper Newsbeat.
“We know that a lot of people are upset about it, but we did it for the right reasons,” the Sports Interactive studio director adds.
“I wasn’t happy with the quality of the game, and I wasn’t prepared for people to be going out and spending their hard-earned money on something that wasn’t good enough.”
The game’s origins go back to 1992 as Championship Manager, before Sports Interactive launched Football Manager in 2004 after a split with its publisher.
This is the first time the game has paused the annual release since it began, with some fans claiming the communication wasn’t clear enough.
But Jacobson says the company was trying to be as “transparent as we can be” about the reasons for the U-turn.
“If we had released FM25 in the state that it was in, it wouldn’t have been good value for money and it would have damaged us forever.”
“When it comes to cancelling, we have to let the stock market know first,” Jacobson adds, “so it kind of limits what we can do and we can’t give hints towards it until the city are able to be told.”
“It’s the most expensive decision we’ve ever made.”
Sports Interactive had previously said the latest game was its “biggest technical and visual advancement for a generation” and it didn’t want to compromise its quality by rushing its release.
Those features will now go into Football Manager 26, including a new game engine with updated graphics and a new user interface.
“[The cancellation] has had an impact on what we can put into FM26,” says Jacobson.
“We spoke about how we weren’t going to have an email inbox, it was all going to be WhatsApp based now – that system didn’t work.”
The new game will also be the first in the series to feature women’s football, which had been planned for FM25.
Ahead of that anticipated launch in 2024, the developer told Newsbeat that it had to build a new player database and record motion-capture that represented female players.
Jacobson had previously spoken about women’s football not being commercially viable to include in the game.
So what changed their minds?
“At an event, some of [England’s] Lionesses came and told me that it would never be commercially viable unless people like us got behind it,” he reveals.
The delayed inclusion has been frustrating for streamer and FM player Gwen Archer.
“It was upsetting to hear it being held back a year knowing that was such a big thing,” the 26-year-old says.
But better late than never?
“Including women’s football in the game will definitely open up a whole new experience for female gamers, those who identify as women – even male gamers as well will be able to connect on a deeper level.”
FM26’s release date hasn’t yet been confirmed, but Gwen’s backing the developers’ decision to spend more time on it.
“A lot of people would have just put their game out knowing that the game wasn’t ready or up to the standard they feel comfortable with,” she says.
“I’m really excited for what’s coming next because that means a lot of time and effort has been put into it to perfect those things.”
