It’s fair to say that, for some people, Football Manager 2023 has not lived up to expectations.
Despite record sales, FM23 received plenty of criticism over its lack of exciting new features, and Sports Interactive’s apparent reluctance to fix some long-standing bugs. Long-time players, including myself, have begun to wonder if the series is stagnating.
But good news is on the way! Last week, SI put out a lengthy blog post in which studio director Miles Jacobson discussed “The Future of Football Manager”. This development update gives us some exciting details about Football Manager 2024, which will be released later this year… and even gives us a taste of what we can expect in Football Manager 2025!
So, what do the next 18 months have in store for us FMers?
FM23: WHAT WENT WRONG?
If you’ve followed me for a while, you’ll know that I wasn’t impressed by FM23. After getting only a few seasons’ worth of entertainment out of it, I gave FM23 a pretty scathing review, in which I said it was lacking innovation in some areas and needlessly bloated in others.
These viewpoints seem to be shared by several FM stalwarts, including a few big-name content creators. With such an underwhelming list of new features (manager timeline? Seriously?) and the game still looking essentially the same as it had done for years, this really did feel like little more than an FM22 season update. For many FMers who’d grown bored of the same old monotony, this was a tipping point.
The backlash against FM23 was perhaps the strongest and loudest ever for a new Football Manager game. While some arguments (particularly on the forums and on Musk-ified Twitter) went far beyond the pale of good taste, there was also a lot of constructive and fair criticism, which Jacobson himself has acknowledged.
To be clear, Miles has NOT done a Gerald Ratner and admitted that this year’s game was crap. He has, though, been surprisingly honest, even going so far as to say that “the FM23 feature set wasn’t what we’d wanted to deliver”.
He admitted that some potential new features had to be dropped from FM23 at short notice. In addition, some features that had made the cut “didn’t quite hit the mark”. I suspect one of those was the new squad planner, which seemed useful in theory but just didn’t work in practice.
I’m sure that SI are also aware of the long-standing bugs that many of us complain about year after year. Custom views, set-piece set-ups, press conferences, international football, the pre-game editor – these are all things that have been bugged or underdeveloped since Jude Bellingham was just a schoolboy from Stourbridge!
There are also quite a few annoying newer bugs, some of which even slipped in during the last major update. One major bug that was spotted by many FMers very recently is that most Spanish newgens are named Iván (presumably in tribute to Campo) and a lot of Argentinians are generated with the name Tomás. This is a huge immersion-breaker, and with apparently no more fixes on the horizon, it seems FM23 will remain ‘broken’ in this respect.
Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. FM23 has reached a series-record audience of 5 million players and has an 87% approval rating on Steam, so SI must be doing something right. But what does the future hold for Football Manager as it reaches another milestone?
FM24: THE END OF AN ERA?
Football Manager 2024 will be the 20th game in this franchise, celebrating nearly two decades since Sports Interactive broke away from their former publishers Eidos and shacked up with SEGA. The series has come a long way since the launch of Football Manager 2005 – and even longer since the Collyer brothers released their original Championship Manager game in 1992.
FM24 is likely be released around November, so don’t expect any big feature reveals until September at the earliest. However, Miles has been generous enough to announce one addition that is set to debut next season – and it’s a feature that MANY players have requested for years.
You will be able to transfer your FM23 save games over to FM24, meaning that you can continue your long-term career from the older game AND enjoy the benefits of the newer game. You can also do this across all platforms – Steam, Epic, Xbox Game Pass, et cetera.
To be honest, I’m not terribly excited about this feature. Indeed, I’m a little sceptical about how it will work, particularly with importing save files that include a load of custom leagues. OOTP Baseball have had this function in their series for years, and it works quite well by most accounts, but things may not be so smooth where FM is concerned.
However, it is a particularly great addition for anyone playing on Xbox Game Pass. When a new version of FM is released, the previous game is taken off Game Pass, meaning that subscribers cannot continue their saves from the old game. With this feature, they can now (in theory) import their old FM23 game into FM24 and just pick up where they left off.
I’m sure many more improvements will be announced over the coming months. Jacobson has billed FM24 as “the last of its kind”, and has promised “it will inarguably be the most complete version of Football Manager to date”.
This might sound worrying at first. “The last of its kind” – what does that mean? Are SI moving on to another developer? Are they rebranding the game, like what Konami did with PES and EA are doing with FIFA right now? Are they abandoning annual releases and moving to a live-service sales model?
Thankfully, the answer is neither of those…
FM25: A WHOLE NEW BALL GAME
While waffling on about some dragonfly project, Jacobson touched on the Football Manager game engine, which had its last big revamp for Football Manager 2018. He admits that while the match engine has improved from how it was six years ago, certain graphical aspects of the game have gone backwards.
Newgen faces have always been pretty shocking in one way or another. Animations on the pitch still leave plenty to be desired, with strikers even ghosting through opposition defenders at times. And who doesn’t love the stadium graphics, with those pitchside picnic tables and giant 70s-style footballs – and ambulances that have literally been bricked into a corner with nowhere to go?
And while it’s unfair to say that FM23 looks like an old Commodore 64 game, the current graphics engine is clearly showing its age – and its limitations. That brings me onto arguably THE biggest announcement from this development update.
Football Manager 2025 will be the first game in the series to use the Unity game engine. This is a very powerful and sophisticated graphics engine, which has been used by many popular titles such as Cities: Skylines, Cuphead and Untitled Goose Game. Honk if you’re horny.
This should mean improved visuals across the board – more realistic stadiums, smoother player animations, and not to mention a proper collision detection system! It should also mean we won’t have to put up with half our Under-18s squad looking like cavemen anymore.
A brand new user interface is also getting a much-needed revamp. FM23’s UI has not changed very much from FM18, and its menus can be quite tricky to navigate. A more intuitive design would go some way to making Football Manager look more like a modern, attractive video game, rather than a workbook of colourful but complicated Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
Of course, moving to Unity means that the system requirements to run FM25 will be much stricter than before. Your trusty old laptop might just about be able to run FM23 on the lowest settings, but FM25 will probably be a step too far. SI announcing their plans so far in advance will give you plenty of time to consider upgrading to a more powerful computer.
But if you’re a 2D loyalist who loves watching coloured dots move around on a pitch, don’t worry. Jacobson has confirmed that the 2D view WILL still be an option on FM25.
All this has been in the works as early as January 2020, with the original plan being that FM22 would be the first game of this new-look era. Then something called a coronavirus pandemic happened, which meant SI’s plans had to be pushed back TWICE.
And now we move on to the other big FM25 reveal. SI announced back in July 2021 that they had begun work on incorporating women’s football into the Football Manager series. That long-term project will come to fruition on FM25, when the women’s game will make its debut.
In just a year-and-a-half’s time, we will finally get to to coach the likes of Katie McCabe and Sam Kerr in the Women’s Super League, as well as managing in other top female leagues like Germany’s Frauen-Bundesliga and Spain’s Liga F (licences pending, of course). The Women’s Champions League is also likely to be covered, thanks to SI’s licencing agreement with UEFA.
It makes sense to bring women’s competitions into the fold at the start of this new era, with a shiny new match engine. SI have always been clear that they want to do the women’s game justice when it debuts. Rushing it out before it’s ready – and especially while FM is still using its ugly, outdated graphics – will probably do more harm than good. I for one am happy to wait an extra year.
Naturally, and unfortunately, there’ll be some naysayers who’ll argue that this is just a waste of time or resources, or that “nobody cares” about women’s football. It’s funny how these misogynists aren’t quite so vocal about… say, the Latvian men’s league being playable in FM. (For what it’s worth, the average attendance in the Virslīga last year was 358, and the highest attendance was 4,258. The average attendance in the WSL this season just gone was 5,444.)
At any rate, it’s unlikely we’ll hear much more about FM25 for quite a while. SI probably won’t be ready to let us have a first look at the new graphics engine until at least the second quarter of 2024.
POTENTIAL CONCERNS
As excited as I am about the next two versions of FM, I do still have some concerns about the franchise’s long-term future. For one thing, while he was discussing the technology behind FM25, Jacobson said, “We also started looking at different business models, platforms, working practices, and Games as a Service, and if and how we might tie these things together.”
A shiver went up my spine as soon as Jacobson mentioned ‘Games as a Service’. As far as I’m concerned, the GaaS model encourages lazy game development and fleeces players with over-monetisation. The ‘always online’ aspect makes me worry about losing access to a game I bought if the publishers see it as unsustainable and abruptly pull the plug.
To put it another way, I like this concept about as much as James Stephanie Sterling does. If SI ever moved Football Manager onto a ‘LiVe SeRv1cEz’ release model (imagine I said that in Sterling’s nasal, sarcastic tone), I would probably retire from the series for good.
Reassuringly, Jacobson confirmed in an interview with Eurogamer that “the plan at the moment is to remain as an annual iterative product… there are no plans at this time to change that, because we don’t need to”. But who’s to say Football Manager won’t ever become a live service further down the line? Even the prospect of that scares me quite a bit.
It also remains to be seen how the modding community will be affected by this overhaul. Cities: Skylines has a HUGE number of user-made mods on the Steam Workshop, so the move to Unity could open more doors for FMers who want to customise their game. On the flip side, I wouldn’t be surprised if licencing concerns led to SI making it harder to import your own name files or graphics.
Some people are sceptical about the reboot. These will be the biggest changes to SI’s series for just over 20 years, since Championship Manager 4 brought a brand-new 2D match engine, a new interface… and more bugs than a compost heap. Teething problems will be inevitable on FM25, but SI have been burnt by previous experience and will not want to leave us waiting until spring 2025 to play.
As for FM24, others have legitimate concerns that this might be another stop-gap game, with all the big changes being saved for FM25. As someone who (until recently) tended to only buy a new FM every two years because of the minimal improvements, I can understand why you might want to sit FM24 out – especially if you already own FM23 and/or FM22.
That being said, I am confident that SI will pull out all the stops to make FM24 the best possible version of this Football Manager era. Just look at all the games that ended the various Championship Manager eras.
Championship Manager 97/98 was the last game in the series that ran on MS-DOS, while Championship Manager 01/02 brought the much-loved CM3 era to an end. Neither game was a massive improvement on their respective predecessors, but they remain hugely popular today because they were the definitive editions. Even Championship Manager 03/04 was regarded as a much-needed update to CM4, restoring SI’s reputation and standing them in good stead for the start of the Football Manager series.
FM24 will be the culmination of a 20-year evolution. FM25 promises to be the revolution that starts a new golden age for the series.
The future is bright. The future is… well, hopefully not purple. Seriously, this series needs a makeover.
Those were my thoughts on the big changes coming to Football Manager. If you’ve got any thoughts you’d like to share, feel free to drop a comment below. You can also find me on Twitter @Fuller_FM… if that hasn’t crashed again.
Thanks for reading.
Fuller FM 
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