Bad news sports fans, Football Manager 2025, the next iteration of the popular management sim has been hit with a new delay. The game is now targeting a release in March 2025.

The news comes from developer, Sports Interactive, who made the announcement via the Football Manager website today. This announcement comes mere weeks after they announced the game would release in November. In what feels like a pretty honest statement, they acknowledge the frustrations fans may feel, whilst addressing some of the challenges they’ve faced in developing Football Manager 2025.

Noting a slower progress that they would have liked, they acknowledged community feedback that they were running the risk of rushing development, which, as we know, could very well lead to a poorly optimised and performing game, which none of us want!

This is the second delay the game has received, being pushed from its original September 2024 release window to November. Now we’ll must wait until Sports Interactive confirm the new specific March release date. They also confirmed that the ‘Advanced Access’ period should be expected at a later date, in line with the new release window. Sports Interactive also confirmed that the new gameplay reveal will happen towards the end of January 2025.

You can read the full statement from Sports Interactive below:

“After careful consideration, Sports Interactive have made the tough decision to further delay the release of Football Manager 25.

Following discussions with SEGA, our licensors and partners, we have agreed the best course of action is to delay the launch until March 2025. Specific platform release dates will follow once confirmed.

In our last Development Update in September, we explained that we needed to push FM25’s original release back to give ourselves more time to deliver the best possible experience for this first instalment in a new era of Football Manager.

This additional time has not been sufficient to ensure the game quality and experience meets your expectations and our very high standards. 

In the previous blog we explained that it has been a difficult development cycle for the studio. Many things have been moving slower than we had predicted _ despite everyone in the team working at an incredible pace to try and get everything done. 

Timelines were already tight and, as rightly pointed out by many of your recent comments, we were simply rushing too much and in danger of compromising our usual standards. This has put an enormous amount of pressure on everyone working across the studio, who are all passionately committed to delivering the best game possible. 

FM25 is the biggest technical and visual advancement in the series for a generation. We simply cannot compromise the delivery of this crucial juncture in Football Manager’s history by rushing to release it in November.

Of course, this is not where any of us expected to be seven weeks out from our release but, in the spirit of our studio values, we always consider the bigger picture _ and the bigger picture here is that we need this additional time to deliver a game that we can all be proud of.

For the large numbers of you who have already pre-ordered the game, we thank you very much for your trust and support. Given the delay, however, should you wish to claim a refund, please contact your retailer.

Something you noted as missing from our announcement on 30 September was mention of Advanced Access on PC/Mac. We can confirm Advanced Access will be available ahead of the new release date and, when we are confident on how long that period will be, we will update you at the first opportunity. The new gameplay reveal will also now move to the end of January 2025.

We are intensely aware that this will be massively disappointing for you. We share that disappointment and are extremely sorry. 

Thank you for reading and your patience. It means the world to us as we continue to work on creating a new era for Football Manager.”

Although disappointing, I’m always reassured when a developer is honest and can acknowledge that things weren’t ready to go. Better to have a delayed and better game, than a released and buggy and awaiting patches game. What say you?

Football Manager 2025 is scheduled to release on PC, PS5, Xbox Series and Nintendo Switch in March 2025.