Miles Jacobson has been going around doing various interviews explaining what happened with the cancellation of FM25. Here's everything in one place.

Summary

• FM25 was postponed twice then cancelled because the game wasn’t fun or up to SI’s quality (consumer tests ~7/10).
• Three same-day curveballs triggered the initial delay: a forgotten dev process, a legal issue, and a third-party problem.
• Stock-market disclosure rules limited communication and made announcements look clumsy.
• Decision to cancel came after Christmas playtesting; Sega backed the call despite financial hit; no layoffs due to cancellation.
• No FM24 “data update” due to licences, incompatible data formats, and engineering cost.
• FM26 keeps some FM25 work but restores familiar navigation (inbox-style messaging, back/forward, secondary nav, bookmarks, search).
• Women’s football added in FM26 with multiple leagues/licences; >35k players rated; men’s and women’s modes can run side-by-side.
• Internal retros and “hit squads” focused on UX, transfers, colours, and polish; iteration ran March–July.
• Partners (e.g., Premier League) largely supportive; relationships intact.
• Studio accepts comms missteps; abuse (including anti-Semitic) pushed Miles off social media.
• FM26 targeted for a broadly similar time of year to past releases; confidence is high after fixes.

BBC Interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHTWToLYX_U

We know we looked a bit stupid. It was a little bit embarrassing. If we'd released FM25 in the state that it was in, it wouldn't have been good value for money and it would have damaged us forever.

So, right now we are uh in the reception area of our offices in Stratford in here east which is part of the Olympic Legacy. And uh we're sitting in our reception area and surrounded by football shirts from some of our favorite players of all time.

We've got to talk about the cancellation of Football Manager 2025. What led to that decision?

So, first the game was postponed and then eventually the company said that the game wasn't going to come out anymore. So, can you talk us through what happened?

The reason for the cancellation was really simple, which is I wasn't happy with the quality of the game. And people work really, really hard to get the money together to be able to buy computer games, right? They're they're not cheap things. And whilst in FM's case, it is good value for money, if we'd released FM25 in the state that it was in, it wouldn't have been good value for money, and it would have damaged us forever.

It was the most ambitious title that we'd ever set out to make. We'd changed our engine. There's a lot inside the game um was changing. But during the development cycle um there were a few things that went wrong during the cycle. And to be frank, even if everything had gone perfectly, we still might not have made it to with the quality level that we were expecting um that our consumers expect from us as well.

We originally postponed the game actually for different reasons to the cancellation. At the time that we postponed the game, not all of the content was inside the game and there were three things that went wrong on the same day.

One was a big development curveball of something we'd simply forgotten about and then it came into the mix and we were like, well, how on earth can we do that with all this other stuff that we need to do? One of them was a legal thing and one of them was was something with a third party. And those three things happened on the day that we announced that the game was coming. If they'd happened a week before, we would not have announced that the game was coming.

We knew that we were going to have to postpone. Um, so went down the path of what we could do. And it meant that we'd done a big announcement. We'd said when other announcements were coming and then we didn't make the other announcements because simply we knew that we were going to postpone the game, but there was a lot there were a lot of steps that we needed to go through before we could confirm that.

So, we know we looked a bit stupid. It was a little bit embarrassing, but it was also unavoidable because of these unknown unknowns that hit us. Known unknowns we can deal with. Unknown unknowns we can't.

The the cancellation was different. So, once all the content was in, we had our own internal QA team, quality assurance team who were giving feedback. We'd brought in a load of consumers to test the game as well. Um, and the average rating we were getting from the consumers was around seven out of 10. That's not a sports interactive quality level. And um, I personally think that they were being quite generous as well with the schools.

So, I got a build of the game just before Christmas, which was meant to be right, this is the the final version of it, apart from bug fixes and what we need to do. And I was about two hours into playing it when I just said to myself, "This isn't good enough. We can't we can't do this. This isn't to our normal quality level."

And then waited a little bit because it was Christmas. I didn't want to ruin people's Christmases. Um and I carried on playing and every time I was playing, it was like, "Nope, still the same thing."

And first day back in the new year, um, I spoke to the COO here, I spoke to the coms director here, and I spoke to my production director, and then spoke to Sega's CEO um, to say that this will be a very big mistake if we are to release. Um, we'd made too many changes to the UI. We tried to be too clever with what we were doing.

We started going through the corporate motions of what you have to do when you're going to cancel. Spoke to the team, the dev team a few weeks later and put together the plan to make the announcement. And we wanted to make the announcement at the end of January because we'd said there was going to be more news in January.

But again, we looked a little bit stupid because we couldn't say anything in January because of Japanese stock market rules where our parent company are based. So, um, at the earliest opportunity, which ended up being 2:30 in the morning UK time, we put out the announcement to say that the game was cancelled, um, mentioned that again at 9:00.

But um but the the TLDDR version is I wasn't happy with the quality of the game and I wasn't prepared for people to be going out and spending their hardearned money on something that wasn't good enough. It would be unfair on them.

There has been some criticism though of the communication and the way that the cancellation was handled. Some fans saying that was a lack of transparency. I guess what what do you make of that?

We own it. Um we would have liked those announcements to be slightly different but given the reasons why they've come when they came. I mean when it comes to transparency historically I think we have been massively transparent as a studio. I've do multiple blogs a year. Up until last October I was on social media for people to talk to me directly. I didn't have anyone managing the account. I would reply to people.

Um, and then I had some abuse last year that was the final straw. And th this this will sound weird, right? But I'm used to people having a go at me when they lose a a game inside Football Manager. I'm used to death threats, which is a ridiculous thing to say, but I've had quite a few of them now.

What I'm not used to is um anti-Semitic abuse, which happened to me on social media. Now, I personally don't believe in organized religion. If people want to, that's great. That's up to them. I totally respect what everyone else wants to believe. But my mother was Jewish. Therefore, by birth, I am recognized as being Jewish.

And to camp to come at me someone who has campaigned against racism for his whole career, that's the final straw for me. So, unfortunately, that that has now gone.

But um we tried to be transparent and where some of these accusations have come from is I wrote in a blog that we will be as transparent as we can be. No corporation, no business can ever be fully transparent because there are there are laws that stop you from doing so.

So when it comes to postponing, you have to let the stock market know first. So that's why we were delayed at being able to announce that when it comes to cancelling, you have to let the stock market know first. So it kind of limits what we can do and we can't give hints towards it until the city are able to be told. So it's frustrating for us as well because we wanted to be telling people as quickly as possible. We just couldn't.

Has not releasing Football Manager 25 had an impact on what you've been able to put into Football Manager 26?

Yeah, it it has had an impact on what we could put in FM26. And it was it was very important for us to take stock and actually look at what had gone wrong in the process. And a lot of the a lot of the dev teams inside the dev team, cuz you split everything up into smaller pieces, had retros to to work out where they thought that things had gone wrong. Um, not just in their area, across the whole business.

As part of our first announcements, for example, we spoke about how we weren't going to have a an email inbox anymore. It was all going to be WhatsAppbased now because that's how people work in football. The reality is that system did not work well in game at all. Um, and that was one of the biggest frustrations or the second biggest frustration with the user experience away from the navigation was that system.

That system's now changed and we've gone back to something a little bit more familiar. It's still new. There's still a lot of difference, but it's a lot more familiar.

One of the new features for initially for Football Manager 25, but now for 26 is the introduction of women's football into the game. Something you've spoken about in the past wanting to bring in um but at that time it maybe wasn't commercially viable.

What led you to this decision and what challenges has it posed as you've developed the game?

So, you're right that I did use that line that it wasn't commercially viable. And the reason that we changed our minds and decided to do it was um at an event um some of the lioness's came to say hello and told me that it would never be commercially viable unless people like us actually got behind it.

Um, and the BBC have done that and Sky have done that and uh, EAFC have done that and now we are and we're late to the party. And again, I apologize for that. But sometimes it takes someone better informed than you to give you some information for you to be able to make a decision. And that's what happened there.

Now, since we made that decision, obviously women's football has become more and more popular, but there is still a glass ceiling that needs to be smashed through, and they need people like us and yourselves at the BBC to help smash through that glass ceiling.

Um, because the quality of the game is getting so much better than it was. Um, and you know, there's the attendances are definitely going up as well. We've got next season Arsenal will be having most of their league games, if not all of their league games actually at their home stadium rather than having them at Bornewood. That's going to drive the average crowd size up.

The same things happening at other clubs as well. You've got Everton announcing that Everton women are now going to be playing at Goodison. Um, which is a huge commitment from that new ownership because they would have got a lot of money from building flats on that ground instead.

Um, so we're now going to be part of the the journey um that can hopefully help it break through the glass scene because at the end of the day it's just football, right? Whether whether it's women playing football or men playing football, it's football.

Um, so we have gone quite big on on women's football. We'll be making announcements in the next few weeks and exactly how big, but there there will be a good selection of leagues. There's a good selection of licenses um to play and uh there will be um lots of choice for people but you can also seamlessly move between men's football and women's football inside the game.

It doesn't differentiate um which is also something that we wanted to ensure was the case um when we were making the game. So, it's something we're very excited about and hopefully we will have done um hopefully we'll have done the people who originally came to talk to me about it justice.

Eurosport Interview

https://www.eurogamer.net/the-big-football-manager-interview-series-boss-miles-jacobson-on-what-went-wrong-with-fm25-and-what-to-expect-from-fm26 

It's been a rough year for Football Manager. This time last summer, the ambitious FM25 was still a certainty, but while the development team at Sports Interactive remained optimistic - albeit to different degrees - soon came the first of two delays. FM25 would arrive two or three weeks later than its usual early November slot, the studio announced, with perhaps one of the first clues things weren't going entirely smoothly.

It was fully unveiled later that month. Then, less than two weeks later, given a second, unprecedented delay to March 2025, a window that would've seen it launch three-quarters of the way through the football season. And in February this year it was cancelled altogether, the developer opting instead to divert all of its energy to this year's Football Manager 26. It's the first time in Sports Interactive's 30-plus years of operating that they've failed to release an annual entry into the series.

"It's my job to get the game out every year," Miles Jacobson, Sports Interactive's long-serving studio director tells me, during an hours-long conversation at the developer's east London HQ earlier this summer. "We've done that for 30 years. But I failed to release something that was good enough."

In a spacious corner office overlooking the still-sparkling development area of the 2012 Olympic Park in Hackney Wick, surrounded by framed football shirts, studio awards and a not-insignificant amount of desktop clutter, Jacobson sits facing outwards, looking over two big sofas towards an even bigger wall-mounted TV. Unlike many of the pristine, chaperoned office tours I've been on over the years, this one is very much the picture of a place in active use for work. And the work on FM26, which will, if all finally goes to plan, be released some time later this year, is still very much in progress.

Jacobson, after the roughest of development years, tells me he's "feeling much, much better about things" this time around. "We're making huge progress every day. We're at a stage now where we are nearly feature complete." And, crucially: "It feels like Football Manager." For some time, with the old version of FM25 that would morph into this year's FM26, that wasn't the case.

Ultimately, FM25 was delayed and then cancelled for a simple reason. "It just wasn't fun," as Jacobson puts it. And it went through multiple delays before that cancellation for the same reason so many other games do the same as well. The goal was to make FM25 a genuine "leap" forward from the series entries before it. It was based on a new engine, in Unity. It had an all-new UI based on tiles, cards, and a central 'portal' that replaced the time-honoured Inbox. There was a huge visual revamp. And ultimately, doing all of that during a regular, annualised release schedule simply proved too much. "We put ourselves under a huge amount of pressure with FM25," Jacobson says. "We were trying to do the impossible - trying to make the impossible possible - and there were times when we thought we could do it."

A lot of FM25's issues were picked up on, to some degree, as far back as late last summer. "I had an inkling even before we announced," Jacobson says, referring to the official announcement of the game on 30th September last year, "but you can't pull an announcement when it's ready to go because you've got lots of things lined up - you've got spend lined up, you've got interviews lined up, you've got all this stuff."

And so, "we went out, we knew a few hours later - the decision was made literally one or two days afterwards that we were going to have to move the game." 10 days later - after a delay to go through the due process of "stock market stuff", with Sports Interactive owned by Sega, which is publicly traded on the Japanese stock market - the studio announced the big delay to the following March, and put out the roadmap for when certain aspects of the game would be revealed. Even then, the timeline was ambitious. "The shit was flying from all directions," as Jacobson puts it. "It became really clear really quickly that we weren't going to be able to hit the roadmap," simply because footage of the game just wasn't coming out well - "because the game wasn't in a good enough state."

The big realisation, that FM25 was simply never going to be ready in time, came over Christmas. The whole studio took a two-week break over the holidays, during which Jacobson traditionally boots up that year's in-development version of the game to play around with it, and come back in the new year with a fresh perspective. "I knew within an hour that we weren't going to be able to deliver."

"On paper, everything looked great," Jacobson says. "The core game was there." The user experience, however, was the big problem. "You couldn't find things in-game. It was clunky. Some of the screens were double-loading. The actual game itself was working - graphically, we weren't where we wanted to be. We didn't have the big leap that we wanted; it was a very good jump, but it wasn't a leap," he goes on. Part of the big, generational "leap" Jacobson is referring to here is down to the shift from the old, proprietary engine Sports Interactive has been using with Football Manager for decades to a new version of Unity, but again that just proved even more challenging than expected.

That said, the issues weren't really technical. "It wasn't crashing a lot, it just wasn't fun. It felt clunky." The game almost lost its famous - or infamous, if you ask the partners of one of FM's many ludicrously dedicated players - "one more game" factor. It 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." And then compounding all that were the issues with navigating through the new UI itself. "People were going: I can't find the youth squad."

Jacobson describes an awkward wait until the new year, opting to give the team a proper break rather than breaking the company's rule on out-of-hours communication. On the first day back in the new year, when Jacobson was still meant to be off for the holidays, he came straight in and spoke to Matt Caroll, Sports Interactive's COO, about the realisation the game wouldn't make it for its twice-delayed release window of March 2025. Then, "within an hour," he was talking to Jurgen Post, the recently-returned, long-running executive who's now COO of Sega's West Studios, telling him simply, "I can't put this out."

Sega, Jacobson says, was surprisingly understanding. "To be fair, Jurgen was brilliant with it - he wanted to know the reasons why. There was no screaming, or anything like that." The studio and Sega then had to "go away and work out how it was going to affect the financials," before presenting it fully to Sega Japan, "who were also– they weren't happy, but they were understanding," Jacobson says. The teams together looked into a few different options. "What if we released in June? What if we released in May, does that give you enough time?" One of those was "knocked on the head by Sega," Jacobson says, because "commercially it wouldn't have worked." Another didn't give the studio enough time to fixed what needed fixing. And so they took the third option. "Bite the bullet and cancel, and go big or go home for this year" with FM26.

That process again was complicated. "There are a lot of things that have to happen," as Jacobson puts it, when you cancel an annualised game like Football Manager, that has all kinds of licenses and agreements - and a Japanese stock market to contend with. That conversation happened right at the start of January, for instance, but wasn't publicly announced until the next month. Japanese stock market rules also meant that the news had to go out at 2am UK time, "which was then followed by people saying that we were trying to bury it." Jacobson also had to record a video of himself, addressed to "everyone at Sega," explaining all the reasons why he had opted to cancel the game. "Which was not an easy video to do."

"January wasn't an easy month," he says. "If there's such a thing as crying emoji that actually cries out of the screen, that's very much what that month was like."

One significant upside amongst it all, however, was that the studio managed to avoid any layoffs related to the decision. But the financial impact was just as significant. "We lost a year of revenue," Jacobson puts it bluntly. Then came all the discussions with the various partners and license owners, including the Premier League - freshly announced, ironically, as coming to the game for the first time with FM25 - "who were all very understanding - to different levels of understanding. Some of them were more 'Hulk' than others when it came to their reactions," Jacobson smiles. "But again, totally understandable, the ones that weren't happy. We took it on the chin."

The Premier League, for their part, were "awesome to work with," he adds. "It was getting messages of support from them, rather than anything else. And then it was, 'we have to alert you to these clauses…'" he jokes. "Everyone who had to get paid, got paid. We didn't shirk any of that stuff, and all of our relationships are intact with all of the licenses - and there will be more licenses for FM26… which we look forward to shouting very, very loudly about at some point."

Beyond all those external to the studio was the impact on Sports Interactive's own staff. Jacobson describes the mood to me as "a mixture of relief and upset." As well as "anger at some of the decisions that had been made… totally justifiable," he adds. "Relief was the overarching thing, but there are some people at the studio whose confidence in the management team would absolutely have been knocked." Notably, he adds, despite expecting some people to leave, the studio "probably had less turnover this year than normal" in terms of staff.

Some of those staff were also insistent that the studio had to at least do some kind of data update - a release of new stats, player ratings, results and other database elements to turn FM24 into a kind of makeshift FM25 to tide over fans - something the studio ultimately, and somewhat controversially, decided against. "Having now scoped the work that would be required, and despite a good initial response from many of our licensors, we cannot lift assets that we are using in FM25 and make them work in FM24 without recreating them in full," a statement on that decision from Sports Interactive read, in late October last year.

"The same applies to the many competition rules, translations and database changes that cannot be back ported. The updated assets and data would both be required to obtain licensor approval - they cannot be separated.

"This is a substantial undertaking which would take critical resources away from delivering FM25 to the highest possible quality, which we simply cannot compromise on."

As Jacobson puts it to me here, "there's a bunch of different reasons" why they ultimately opted against it. "For a start with some leagues, we didn't have the rights of the license for a data update," he explains, "because contractually, it's for a particular year. (Even just keeping FM24 available to buy, and available on the various subscription services it was on, took significant negotiation.)

Then there were more technical reasons: the data that was set to be used for FM25, and now FM26, was formatted in a "completely different" way to the old games, effectively meaning the studio would have to do the work twice. "We worked out that it was around two months' work for one of our most senior engineers - so the licensing team would have had to drop everything, switch to this, and probably three or four months of work for them." On top of all that, he adds, there are "lots of unofficial updates out there - so we knew that people who wanted a new update would be serviced anyway. And the logistics behind it were a nightmare. So it wasn't that we didn't want to do it."

Instead, the studio's engineers continued largely uninterrupted, while others focused on post-mortems and handling the complicated messaging. "QA and design were tasked with: if we had our time again, what would we do differently? Comms were scrabbling, trying to put a new plan together… plus we're working out: how the fuck do we tell the consumers what's actually going on, and the timings for that?" The work in earnest, based on an "iteration plan" from those QA and design teams, started in March. July was the end date for that, and bug-fixing the final focus in the last few months up to launch.

Much of this - the realisation that the game wasn't fun, the delays, the cancellation itself - was down to the ambitious, perhaps over-ambitious, decision to ditch the Inbox functionality that players have known for decades in exchange for a 'portal' that acted as your main in-game hub, and a WhatsApp equivalent for in-game communication.

The justification was sensible enough. As Jacobson put it to me last year, "it's very rare that you see a football manager with a laptop" in the real game. "They've got their tablet, and they've got their phone, so we wanted to move into that more. The football world never really had email!"

Back in his office, Jabocson starts to explain the problems and how they were resolved, before ultimately conceding that showing is a lot easier than telling. He boots up his PC and switches on the giant television on the wall, then starts up a development version of the game. Previously, he explains, there were three windows of equal size, in vertical columns from left to right, replacing your old Inbox system of a narrow scrolling list on the left and the 'email' itself on the right. But just parsing the information there was difficult. Most English-speaking humans want to read from left to right, but often the key information would be in the middle pane. The right-hand one would feel redundant, and the left a less-clear version of what the old email list could've done anyway.

Beyond that, the wider navigation around the game was also hugely streamlined. In FM25 there would've been a single navigation bar along the top right, Jacobson explains, which had buttons for the "portal, squad, recruitment, match day, club, and career". Within each of those sections you'd find "tiles and cards", the system briefly outlined with FM25's initial unveiling last year.

Therein lay the problems. Playtesters, including FM's developers and Jacobson himself, couldn't find things - "if you can't find something in-game, you made a mistake," Jacobson says, of its UX design. "We brought some consumers in, and the consumer scores weren't bad - we were getting sevens from the consumers. But I want nines."

That iteration time, between March and July this year, has made what Jacobson feels is a significant difference. Some of the changes are remarkably simple - to the point where it's a surprise they weren't included in the first place. There are now back and forward buttons, for instance, as there are in FM24 and others before it, that were removed for FM25. There's a secondary navigation bar below the main one, showing you all the sub-sections within those main ones without you having to click around to find things. There's a configurable bookmarks section, where you can add instant navigation to specific screens of your choice, and a search bar. Which, again, feels like an astonishing omission in the first place. As one developer put it to Jacobson after trying out the improved UI, compared to the old FM25 one, FM26's feels like "a warm hug."

Jacobson, for his part, also feels significantly better about it. "I don't believe we're going to be disappointing people when we bring the game out. I don't believe that we are going to lose the reputation that we've worked really hard to build up in the 30, 31 years I've been here." Most importantly: "We've got a fucking great game! We didn't have a great game in December, and genuinely that's what it completely comes down to. We didn't have a great game."

Would Jacobson make the same decision again, in hindsight - to move to the new engine, tear up the usual Football Manager playbook and go for this big, ambitious "leap" that ultimately failed with FM25? "My answer is different on different days," he replies.

"As a studio, we've always been really ambitious with what we've done, with what we've tried to do. We had reached the end of the line with the previous engine, so we needed to do something." Ultimately, he says, it was "absolutely the right decision" to change engines when the studio did - in fact they "really didn't have a choice but to change the technology, because we'd reached that point where we were breaking the technology that we had."

"Did we make the right decision? Yes," he continues. "Did we do everything correctly after making that right decision? No. Are there changes that I would have made to the decisions, if I had my time again? Yes. But I don't lose sleep over those because you can't manage them - and everything in life learns from the mistakes that they make.

"There might be some people in the studio who disagree with my answers on those, and think that we should have just carried on as-is. It wouldn't have been right for anyone. If we had, we would have just stagnated. And stagnation is not good."

As we wrap things up, I try to tease out a little more detail on when FM26 might finally arrive. For the first time in an age, Football Manager fans who've planned holidays around the series' near-clockwork release in early November (and 'advanced access' period of a few weeks immediately before it), don't have a clear idea of what to expect. A "broadly similar time of year," is what Jacobson is willing to give up on the record, and "there will definitely be a period where people can try the game, for sure, but whether it's called a beta or it's early access, we will make the decision down the line."

For now, there's still work to do. "We've got some bugs to fix, we've got some little bits of iteration to do," he says. "Today's problem is that we've got some issues with lighting in the match engine - so I'm not going to say it's calm, because it never is - making games is really hard."

The difference this time, however, compared to the somewhat frazzled Jacobson I spoke to in August last year, is that he's saying all this with most of Sports Interactive's toughest work behind them. "We've got a lot of work to do," he smiles. "I'm saying that quite calmly."

The Athletic Interview

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6564634/2025/08/29/miles-jacobson-football-manager-interview-fm25-fm26/ 

It has been almost two years since a new edition of Football Manager hit the market.

That time has been filled by a blend of frustration, devastation and more recently, excitement. Sports Interactive, the game’s developers, are gearing up for their latest release, Football Manager 26, and the anticipation has been felt immediately. They posted a teaser video for their newest game on X in the afternoon of August 13. Within an hour, the video had received 25,000 likes and 1.4million views.

To get to that point, however, they have had to endure an “embarrassing” 12 months. Football Manager 25 was billed as the studio’s next big step but after two postponements, the title was cancelled in February 2025 — three months after it was initially set to release.

The Athletic met Miles Jacobson, Sports Interactive’s studio director, to find out what went wrong with their cancelled title and what to expect from the upcoming new release.

For those who may not spend countless hours of their lives being a virtual football manager, Football Manager (or FM) has been part of the sports video games ecosystem since 1992. The game allows players to take charge of a football club, whether it be in the English Premier League or in the Japan Football League.

Created by the Collyer Brothers, Paul and Oliver, who also founded Sports Interactive, it was called Championship Manager. Rebranded as Football Manager early in 2004 following Sports Interactive’s split with previous publishers Eidos Interactive.

The game has been released annually since then, but without a release for the 2024-25 season, 19.2million people ended up playing Football Manager 2024 for longer than intended.

“I feel the need to apologise to our community for not delivering last year,” Jacobson tells The Athletic. “We’ve become a big part of people’s lives. We understand that and the responsibility that we have for people using our game to escape.

“It’s important. But pulling the game last year was absolutely the right thing to do.”

For Jacobson, the decision to cancel FM25 came just before Christmas. He received a build of the game and was going to spend a few days playing it before coming back from his break with notes.

The 54-year-old, who has been at Sports Interactive for over 25 years, quite quickly came to the realisation that features were missing from the build. He cites the inability to find his youth squad before adding, “I literally sat there and just couldn’t find things in my own game. It was pretty embarrassing. It was within an hour that I sat there and thought: ‘We can’t release’.”

By this point, the game had already been delayed twice, with signs that postponements would be necessary months prior. A development update for FM25 was published on September 4, 2024, which had a dedicated ‘revising our timelines’ subsection as a result of three curveballs coming Sports Interactive’s way just hours before.

The first of these was a result of collective human error, as multiple people forgot about a bug-fixing process that is necessary to publish a game.

Jacobson says “that’s completely on us,” before adding, “The second curveball was a legal issue, but with all legal issues, you can never really say what happened. It was an email that came into Sega’s (Football Manager’s publisher) legal team that day that was definitely going to cause a delay in the release.”

He could not go into the issue of the third unexpected development, but postponement talks started that day. There was a realisation that it would be an uphill battle to release FM25 on time, and Jacobson says he could not have justified people spending £50 on what would be released during a cost-of-living crisis.

Miles Jacobson, right, is the studio director of Sports Interactive (Alex Livesey – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)

One of the obstacles Sports Interactive faced with FM25 was a switch to a new game engine called Unity — the mechanism around which everything else, including the game’s design and interface, is built.

This has happened before, with Championship Manager 4, the first version of the game to include a graphical 2D match engine, postponed from late 2002 to March 2003. That delay was at the back of the studio’s minds when this cancellation came along, but the size of the undertaking of this task in the 2020s was underestimated, even with just over two years of pre-production.

Jacobson uses the analogy of what it is like switching from Windows to a Mac for the first time when it comes to changing game engines. In short, it is like learning a new language and way of working overnight, but with added complexities.

“Working with Unity natively, you’re actually programming in a language called C# (or C Sharp), whereas historically, we’ve always programmed in C++,” he says. “We were then expecting it to take about two weeks to do all the work of converting the C++ code into C#. Some of it took two weeks, some of it took nine months.

“Whilst we’ve got some of the underlying code that drives the game, the whole user interface (UI) had to be written from scratch. The graphics all had to be redone. The database was restructured in certain areas. A lot of the code that was in C++ still needed work done to be able to be translated into C#, so there was definitely a lot more work than we were expecting, even though we’d done the pre-production stage.”

Jacobson is insistent that none of the blame should be on Unity in light of this.

The process of choosing the American-developed game engine as Football Manager’s new system was named ‘Project Dragonfly’. It was a collective effort to assess different options on their graphical quality, workload for artists and programmers, and whether they could be used to build the game’s UI. Unity came out on top.  “I completely support the team on that decision and still believe it was the right decision,” Jacobson insists.

“With future games, we’ll still be optimising everything in regard to the game engine, but that heavy lifting is done now.”

The cancellation of FM25 was revealed when Sega Sammy, the holding company that owns Japanese video game company Sega, released its Q3 financial results presentation for the year ending March 2025. Immediately following the news, included as part of its Q3 results, SegaSammy’s stock price dropped by 3.89 per cent.

“Financially, it was a disaster,” Jacobson says. “When you’re used to releasing a game every year, we lost the revenue from every single sale that we believed that we would make. It’s more the revenue that was affected than the costs. The costs weren’t looking great but people were still going out and buying the previous games. There was still some money coming in, but it was nowhere near what was normally coming in.”

In reality, there were three options for Sega and Sports Interactive: release the game anyway, look at alternative dates like May or June — which did not make sense with the football season ending — or think of the long-term impact rather than short-term gains.

Football Manager sponsor Brighton & Hove Albion (Steve Bardens/Getty Images)

Jurgen Post, COO of Sega Europe’s West Studios, was one of Sport Interactive’s first port of calls, and Jacobson says: “He was more understanding than some of the finance people, but they’re doing their job, so I fully understand that.

“In the circumstances, Sega have been massively supportive. I don’t think I’ll be allowed to forget what happened, and I shouldn’t be either, but they understand that quality is important when it comes to releasing games. You can’t just put s*** in a box and expect it to sell.”

Jacobson cites the trust Sports Interactive have built with Sega by delivering annual games over the past 30 years for their understanding of this situation. If they hadn’t bounced back this year, he admits, “I would have been the first out of the door”, but with costs not impacted as much as revenues, nobody has left the studio as a result of the FM25 cancellation. Three people have departed the studio, but that was because of the consolidation of IT teams rather than cancellation-related layoffs. 

Sports Interactive received criticism from some fans for their public silence aside from their announcements of the delays and subsequent cancellation of FM25.

On social media, their posts were either very matter-of-fact statements or confirmations that FM24 was still going to be available on certain platforms. Fans were desperate for updates about FM26, and Sports Interactive admitted they got their communication wrong at first and chose to talk when they believed it mattered.

“We’ve made lots of mistakes,” Jacobson says. “We own them all and I apologise for them all, but you can’t change the past.

“That’s another reason why we went quiet after we announced that the game’s cancelled. We wanted to go back when we’ve actually got something to talk about, not promise that we’re going to be delivering a game this year until we know that we are going to be delivering.

“In this world, you’ve got to shut the f*** up, otherwise people will take a tiny breadcrumb and turn it into a loaf of bread, particularly with the popularity of the game now. So, I’m sorry you’ve had to wait a while, but this is the right time to be talking about it.”

So, what of FM26?

“It’s not what FM25 was going to be, because that was a mistake,” Jacobson says. “There is a lot of FM25 in there. There’s also some more FM24 things in there than there were going to be and there are some things that we already had down for FM26 that are now in there.”

One aspect of the cancelled FM25 that has been deemed a mistake was the desire to move away from drastic changes to the game’s UI. In Football Manager’s June 2024 development update, they stated that they would be moving away from the email system that had been in the game for over a decade in favour of a ’tile and card’ system.

The idea was to replicate how communication in football works in the real world, but Sports Interactive found that the change just did not work in a video game. As a result, a decision was made to redesign and improve the old messaging systems to provide a necessary sense of familiarity.

“Whilst the game is a sequel, the best sequels always have nods back to their predecessors,” Jacobson adds. “We got rid of too many of them, trying to be too ambitious. It’s all well and good saying everything’s new, but we’ve been the best football management game in the market for 30 years — why would you throw all of that out? So we brought some of that familiarity back in.”

The introduction of women’s football was part of what was planned for FM25’s release and work on that has continued for the release of FM26.

At the time of writing, the number of countries and leagues in the game is in the low double figures, while over 35,000 women’s footballers have been rated ahead of their planned inclusion. When players set up the game, they can choose which leagues they want to have active, meaning men’s and women’s leagues can run side-by-side with each other, or players can just run male-only or female-only saves.

“We’re really proud,” Jacobson says. “We’re doing more in year one than any other video game has done in women’s football, full stop.

“Also, a massive thanks to EAFC, who have been really helpful throughout this whole process. In most of the areas where they’ve had exclusive licences in women’s football, they’ve actually agreed to carve us out so that we can have licences as well. We can’t thank them enough.”

Work on FM26 started in secret. While the decision to cancel FM25 had been communicated to Sega in early January, it was not allowed to be shared internally until the end of the month because of stock market rules. Initially, some of the design team began working on what they would do if they had more time, but were not allowed to ask why.

Once the announcement was made internally, the team were split into different hit squads. There were groups looking at the user interface and user experience of the game, another looking at transfers, a squad to fix the colour scheming, and others focused on more areas for improvement.

Asked when he felt happy with FM26, Jacobson says: “I describe it as we’ve been in a very, very long tunnel and we couldn’t see the light at the end of it. When the new messaging system went in, we went round the bend and we could see the light at the end.

“I don’t think any of us realised what a big part of it was, but that was the thing that made me be able to see the light, and it’s not just me — it’s a lot of people here.

“The mood change when that went in was huge, just huge. It was like: ‘Wow, we really do have a game again’.”