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Football Manager, at least in its previous incarnations of Championship Manager is a game that pretty much cost me one of my earliest relationships. I didn’t see the problem at the time, it was a Champions League final run and she had birthdays every year. I used to make the internals of my poor Amiga bleed with that game listening to it crunching all the results week after week, season after season.
The transition over the recent decade or so to Football Manager has truly taken advantage of CPU processing power and created a mega-game that no self-respecting football fan should miss out on, but it’s also fair to say that yearly full-prices updates, EA Sports style have seen the game stagnate.
Even a recent move to Game Pass over the past few years and the potential of not having to pay anything beyond the regular subscription to play each new version hasn’t really hidden the fact that nothing much, apart from under the bonnet maybe, changes that much from November to November.
To be fair you can’t really expect it to reinvent itself on a 12-monthly cycle, that would be insanity, but that is the flaw in the yearly release model.
Anyway, a couple of years back the guys at Sports Interactive promised that the 2025 edition was going to see the most recognizable changes to the format in many moons. That release is heading our way at the end of the year so let’s see how all that is coming along.
What’s new in Football Manager 2025?
FM25 has several new headline features that will make it take strides away from the recent versions. Let’s look at some of these in more detail.
Women’s Football
The rise of the women’s game has been meteoric after decades in the wilderness and this will now be reflected in Football Manager for the first time.
This brings with complexities but Ant Farley from SI said in an interview at the end of last year:
“We wanted to do it properly. And I think that people are going to realize what that means. The level of detail to which we simulate the men’s game, we need to be doing the same for the women’s game.
“We need to be doing it justice. So we’re talking to a lot of people in the women’s game to kind of help us on that journey, getting a lot of insight from some real big names. And yeah, the whole aim is to make it not a mode. Not a kind of, ‘Hey, Women’s Football Manager.’ It’s Football Manager.
“Football is football, right? So it needs to be simulated alongside the men’s game, which is going to be really complicated to implement in a lot of ways. But yeah, it’s a challenge that’s excited us all.”
He also confirmed that players will be able to switch between the male and female leagues in the same save.
A new engine
The look of FM25 is likely to be noticeably different as the team switches to using the Unity engine for the first time. This has given the team the ability to completely revamp the graphics engine and UI and bring it up to industry standards. No news on whether those 25GB of mods and facepacks you downloaded last year will still work though.
New licences
It’s just been announced that after all this time Football Manager now officially has the Premier League licence. No more English Premier Division. In the grand scheme of things, it is such a small change as we all modded it in anyway but from a realism perspective, it is massive. As yet we don’t know whether that means Manchester United will be included as it has refused to be in the game for a good many years now, being one of the few remaining outliers to being included.
This could also mean going forward that some famous stadiums will be replicated, no doubt also easier to do because of the switch to Unity.
Football Manager 2025 release date
There is no official release date for Football Manager 25 at this stage but historically the game comes out every year in November.
A trawl of the Sports Interactive or even the official Football Manager website has nothing on the new games. It is being kept tightly under wraps at this stage. The Premier League licence announcement didn’t even mention it, just that more news would follow how it would be incorporated.
If Football Manager 2025 was not treading this new path we would put our houses on the fact it will be out then, and it probably still will, but we are hoping and praying there are no last-minute new-version hitches that cause any kind of delay.
