31 Aug, 2025
Our resident Football Manager expert takes you through what went wrong with FM25 and what is set to change/improve in FM26!
Credit to Eurogamer and The Athletic for their in-depth interviews with Sports Interactive boss Miles Jacobson, which have given us the clearest picture yet of what really happened with Football Manager 25 and why the team believes FM26 will get things back on track.It’s been a turbulent couple of years for Football Manager fans. For the first time in the series’ 30-year history, there was no new game last season. FM25 was delayed, then delayed again, and finally cancelled in February 2025, a decision that shocked fans but, according to Miles Jacobson, was absolutely necessary.
Speaking to both Eurogamer and The Athletic, Jacobson was brutally honest about the whole saga: the failed ambition, the technical headaches, the financial hit, and ultimately, why FM26 will look very different from the game that never made it out.“We just didn’t have a great game” – Jacobson doesn’t hide from the fact FM25 simply wasn’t good enough. By Christmas 2024, he was supposed to be playing a near-final version of the game before its delayed March release. Instead, he quickly realised fundamental features didn’t work, he couldn’t even find his youth team in the new UI.
“I literally sat there and just couldn’t find things in my own game,” he told The Athletic. “It was pretty embarrassing. Within an hour I thought: ‘We can’t release this’.” The original plan for FM25 was ambitious: a complete overhaul of the UI, a move to the Unity engine, a new “portal” system to replace the traditional inbox, and a big visual upgrade. But as Jacobson told Eurogamer, all that ambition left them with a game that “just wasn’t fun,” and crucially, didn’t feel like Football Manager anymore.
One of the biggest challenges was switching to Unity. Jacobson compared it to “switching from Windows to a Mac overnight,” with his team moving from C++ to a completely new programming language (C#) and rewriting huge chunks of the game from scratch. Some tasks they thought would take two weeks ended up taking nine months. The entire UI had to be rebuilt. Graphics redone. The database restructured. Despite all that, Jacobson insists Unity was the right long-term decision. The old engine had reached its limits, and future Football Manager games will benefit now the hard work is done. But for FM25, the timing meant disaster.Sega’s reaction, the financial hit, and fan criticism
With FM25 scrapped, Sports Interactive lost a full year of revenue for the first time in its history. Sega’s stock price even dropped nearly 4% when the cancellation was announced in its financial reports. But internally, Sega backed the decision. Jacobson says executives understood that releasing a broken game would have done far more long-term damage to the brand than taking the financial hit upfront.Fans, though, weren’t always so understanding. The lack of regular communication frustrated many, with Sports Interactive going quiet after announcing the cancellation. Jacobson admits they got this wrong: “In this world, you’ve got to shut the f*** up,” he told The Athletic. “Otherwise people will take a tiny breadcrumb and turn it into a loaf of bread. We wanted to wait until we actually had something to say.”
Here’s the good news: everything both interviews say about FM26 sounds promising. Firstly, the UI has been completely reworked again, this time bringing back familiar features FM25 threw out. The hated “tile and card” system is gone, replaced with a cleaner layout, better navigation, a search bar, back and forward buttons, bookmarks, and a modernised version of the old inbox system. As Jacobson told Eurogamer, early testers described the new UI as “a warm hug,” compared to the confusing FM25 design.Secondly, the game already feels like Football Manager again. Jacobson says there was a “light at the end of the tunnel” moment when the new messaging system went in, the point where the team felt they had a real game back on their hands.
One of FM25’s most-hyped additions was women’s football, and that work hasn’t been lost. Over 35,000 players have already been added, with both men’s and women’s leagues able to run side by side in FM26. Jacobson even credited EA Sports for helping secure licences in areas where they previously held exclusivity.
On top of that, FM26 will blend the best bits of FM24, some salvaged ideas from FM25, and brand-new features the team had originally planned for FM26 all along.
Jacobson summed it up simply: “We’ve got a f***ing great game now. We didn’t have one in December.”
There’s no confirmed date yet, but Jacobson told Eurogamer it should be around the usual time of year, so expect something close to the traditional November window, along with a beta or early access period beforehand. The difference this time is confidence. After the most difficult year in Sports Interactive’s history, Jacobson and his team finally believe they’ve turned things around. “We’ve been the best football management game for 30 years,” he said. “Why would we throw all that away? This time, we haven’t.”
If you loved this FM article from our resident FM expert Billy, then you absolutely have to check out his breakdown of the single biggest FM survey ever taken!
Check out our full, in depth FM 26 Release Date article, which is constantly updated when we get news on anything FM 26 related!
