Football Manager 25 gets cancelled, but fans are surprisingly ok with it

Following two delays, video game publisher SEGA has now made the decision to cancel Football Manager 25 entirely. This is the first time that the series has skipped a yearly release since the series began in 2004.

The hugely popular football management sim normally sees a new game release every single year, with each new title bringing small updates to the gameplay systems and reflecting the current climate of the world's football stage. This year's version of Football Manager was initially set to launch in November 2024, but SEGA confirmed today that it has canned work on the game altogether.

In a blog post on the Football Manager website, a statement reads: "Sports Interactive regret to inform that, following extensive internal discussion and careful consideration with SEGA, we have made the difficult decision to cancel Football Manager 25 and shift our focus to the next release.

"We know this will come as a huge disappointment, especially given that the release date has already moved twice, and you have been eagerly anticipating the first gameplay reveal. We can only apologise for the time it has taken to communicate this decision."

The blog post goes on to explain that the reason for the delay is due to several missed development milestones. The team had initially decided to delay the game to March in an attempt to reach those goals, but it's since become clear that delivering Football Manager 25 isn't feasible - especially if they expect fans to purchase Football Manager 26 in November 2025.

While SI doesn't clearly state what those milestones were, we do know that it had a much bigger job than usual with this yearly release of Football Manager. This game was set to be the first in the series built using Unity, a