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“FM25 is the starting point for the studio’s next 20 years.” So says Sports Interactive’s head honcho Miles Jacobson in a new development blog for the 2025 iteration of the most famous management sim of all time.
It has been known for a couple of years that Football Manager 25 was to see a big departure from what has gone before it. While not exactly stale, the annual iterations, which from the outside could sometimes seem quite minor to all but the most avid virtual managers, have been a staple of the franchise for over a decade.
Football Manager 25 is set to change a lot of that and it may well break some things along the way. But I don’t think Jacobson and SI are necessarily afraid of that. This is a project that is planned out many years in advance. The dev blog speaks as much about what fluff will be cut from the existing series as much as it does about new features.
Using analytical data from those who opted in to share it the team has taken a good, hard look at Football Manager and taken a sword to the neck of many features that most people didn’t use. That’s not to say nobody used them, and that could well be a source of irritation for some long-serving fans of the game, but they are gone anyway. They are either gone because they are rarely used, or gone because FM25 can’t improve them enough to warrant their inclusion. The cutting room floor is a serious trip hazard.
Some of the chopped features are coming back – Challenge Mode will return in Football Manager 26 or 27, says Jacobson.
Fantasy Draft will be missing from FM25’s launch but will be patched in at some point during the year as it won’t be ready in time.
No shouting
Other features like Touchline Shouts, where managers could give on-the-fly instruction to the team are gone for good. Possibly. “The most used feature that won’t be included in FM25 is Touchline Shouts and these won’t be back for the foreseeable future,“ he says.
I was surprised by this. I used them all the time, but Jacobson’s explanation makes sense, “Shouts have been in the series for many years and, to be frank, I’ve never been happy with them. A “shout” should happen instantly, but they only came into effect after the ball had gone out of play. It also wasn’t clear to players how long the shout lasted for. So, for the time being, touchline shouts are gone from the game.”
Fair enough, the issue might be, that not every player will get to see that explanation and might wonder why something they always used has now been cut and do the standard internet slur of “dumbing the game down”.
With the cuts come the new stuff though. A move to the Unity engine allows for a massive revamp to graphics, not just the in-match stuff but also the UI. Football Manager’s abundance of screens could be seen by many as overwhelming, and how many of them never even got a look in.
A new panel and tile-based system aims to improve that. My natural Microsoft/Windows 8-induced fear of tiles set in when I read that, but it is clear that SI has put years of work, alongside Unity engineers into this and I am hoping for a fewer clicks = more streamlined approach to the data I want to make use of.
As for a release time, the date will be announced in early September with pre-orders opening at the same time. For the last few years, the game has arrived on Game Pass on day one as well.
New gameplay elements will be unveiled shortly after. Have a full read of Miles’ breakdown of what is happening with FM25 and we can’t wait to see this latest stop forward in this famous old franchise.
