From Digital Disaster to Dream Team: Football Manager's Boss on Why FM25 Walked the Plank (and Why FM26 is a 'Warm Hug')
AI Gaming News Author · Eurogamer ·
Football Manager 25 was sensationally cancelled after ambitious plans for a new engine and UI led to a 'clunky' and 'not fun' game, as studio director Miles Jacobson openly confessed. After a tough year of delays and a candid realization over Christmas that the game was broken, Sports Interactive pivoted, pouring all efforts into FM26, which promises to rectify the mistakes with vital UI improvements and a renewed focus on player experience.
Right, so listen up, mates. You know that feeling when you try to cast a teleportation spell, but you accidentally turn your socks into sentient marmalade instead? That's kinda what went down with **Football Manager 25**, only instead of marmalade, it was a multi-million-dollar annual game that, well, didn't happen. It's a proper wild tale, unearthed by Chris Tapsell over at Eurogamer, and I’ve been tinkering with it all morning because, bloody hell, it’s got layers.
Turns out, Sports Interactive – the wizards behind the digital dugout – had a rough year. FM25, originally slated for last summer, was supposed to be a massive, generational 'leap'. We're talking a whole new engine (Unity, for the tech-heads), a spanking new UI that binned the beloved (or, depending on your partner, infamous) Inbox for something called a 'portal', and a visual revamp to boot. Sounds ambitious, right? Too bloody right it was.
Miles Jacobson, the long-serving studio director, admitted he 'failed to release something that was good enough.' That's a pretty candid confession from the top, especially considering Sports Interactive has shipped an FM game every single year for over three decades. But here’s the kicker: after two initial delays (first by a few weeks, then to March 2025, which would’ve had it launching three-quarters of the way through the football season – madness!), FM25 was cancelled entirely in February this year. All efforts got diverted straight to this year's **Football Manager 26**.
Why the dramatic implosion? Simple, according to Jacobson: 'It just wasn't fun.' Imagine building a colossal digital castle, only to find the drawbridge is stuck, the king’s throne is upside down, and all the knights are lost trying to find the privy. That was FM25. They were 'trying to do the impossible – trying to make the impossible possible,' and it stretched them thinner than my patience trying to get past a boss fight with a broken controller.
Jacobson even had an 'inkling' before the official announcement last September, but you can’t just pull the plug on a marketing machine that’s already spinning. So, they announced, then almost immediately decided to delay. The 's*** was flying from all directions,' he reckons, especially when footage of the game wasn't coming out well because, fundamentally, 'the game wasn't in a good enough state.'
The real moment of clarity came over Christmas. Jacobson, like any good dev boss, plays the in-development build during his break. 'I knew within an hour that we weren’t going to be able to deliver,' he said. The core game was there, on paper, but the user experience? A total dog's breakfast. 'You couldn’t find things in-game. It was clunky. Some of the screens were double-loading.' The famed 'one more game' factor, that addictive pull that keeps managers up until 3 AM, was still there, but 'it was really painful… I’m gonna play the next match, but I’ve got to do all this stuff first, I’ve got to go through this and it’s going to be slow, and it’s going to be painful.' No wonder players, and even developers, couldn’t find the youth squad.
It highlights a critical point in game development, doesn’t it? You can have the most advanced engine, the prettiest graphics, and the deepest simulation, but if the player can’t actually *play* it without pulling their hair out, you’ve missed the mark. It’s like having a magical grimoire filled with powerful spells, but the index is missing and half the pages are blank. You’re just not gonna use it.
Jacobson bravely presented the grim news to Sega, who, to their credit, were surprisingly understanding. No screaming, just questions about the 'why'. It resulted in a lost year of revenue and tough conversations with licensing partners (some of whom, he joked, were more 'Hulk' than others), but crucially, no layoffs for the Sports Interactive staff. That's a massive win in an industry that often sees mass redundancies after project failures.
There was also a bit of a kerfuffle about not releasing a data update for FM24 to tide fans over. Jacobson explains it came down to a host of issues: licensing agreements, a 'completely different' data format for the new engine, and the sheer amount of work (months of it!) that would divert critical resources from actually fixing FM26. Fair dinkum, you can see their point, even if it stung some fans.
So, what now? The good news is that those months of 'iteration plan' have made a 'significant difference' to FM26. They've brought back those shockingly absent quality-of-life features like back and forward buttons (seriously, how did those go missing?), a secondary navigation bar, configurable bookmarks, and a search bar. Basic stuff, right? But essential. One developer even described the new FM26 UI as feeling like 'a warm hug,' which, after the clunky chaos of FM25, sounds like pure bliss.
Jacobson admits that the decision to shift engines was 'absolutely the right decision' – they were hitting the limits of their old tech. But 'did we do everything correctly after making that right decision? No.' It’s a classic tale of ambition over-reaching, a development team pushing boundaries, and then having to rein it back in, learning hard lessons along the way. But stagnation, he argues, 'is not good.' And who can argue with that?
FM26 is still in development, fixing bugs and tweaking bits, but Jacobson sounds much calmer, much more confident this time around. He’s promising a release around a 'broadly similar time of year' as usual, with a trial period for players. It seems like Sports Interactive has managed to turn a potential career-ending own goal into a last-minute winner. Here's hoping FM26 truly gives us that 'warm hug' we've been craving.
Tags: Gaming News, Game Development, Football Manager, Sports Interactive, Game Cancellation
Original article: Eurogamer