Hello again. I’m glad you’ve come. You’ve obviously heard there’s a new Football Manager game on the way.
As a new club football season draws closer, the excitement about the next installment of FM is ramping up. Last week, Sports Interactive’s studio director Miles Jacobson wrote a lengthy Development Update in which he gave us an early look at FM25’s revamped user interface – and explained some big changes coming to the game.
This is a follow-up to last year’s “The Future of Football Manager” update, where Jacobson first announced that SI were planning big changes on FM25. If you want to read my thoughts on that, you can read them here.
But now that the dragonfly is out of the bag, let’s talk a bit more about Football Manager 2025… or, should I say, Football Manager 25.
WE ARE PREMIER LEAGUE!
Though Football Manager as we know it began in 2004, Sports Interactive’s hit franchise had been going strong under another name for a decade. Championship Manager was first released in 1992 – the same year that Sky Sports launched “the best league in the world” to some mild fanfare.
And now, 32 years later, FM finally has an official licence for the Premier League. That means all 20 of England’s top teams will be badged, faced and kitted up in all their glory on FM25. No more English Premier Division; no more Manchester UFC!
Being the PL’s official football management video game is a major coup for SI. After all, they’ve spent decades trying to get hold of a licence which EA have held with a vice-like grip.
Some people will shrug, “So what? I’ve been downloading graphics and name fixes from Sortitoutsi or FM Scout for years.” But it’s worth remembering that not all FMers know how to modify their games – and adding custom graphics to FM24 Console is incredibly difficult, if not practically impossible.
You might also have spotted that Sports Interactive and Football Manager each have new logos – with SI getting their first rebrand since 2004.
Another significant detail I noticed in the latest Development Update is that Jacobson only ever referred to the next game as Football Manager 25 – NOT Football Manager 2025.
This suggests that from now on, the titles of each FM will only have the last two digits of the year. This makes sense, given that most of us shorten the latest game as FM24 rather than FM2024. Incidentally, EA made this same transition nearly two decades ago – going from FIFA Football 2005 to FIFA 06.
I understand my theory might be completely wrong, and we’ll all be pre-ordering Football Manager 2025 in September. But whatever its full name is, FM25 will surely give the franchise the reboot it needs.
SHOUTS – AND OTHER OUTS
Jacobson said that his team had reviewed EVERY feature and screen in FM – and asked, with hindsight, whether they would have implemented them in the same way (if at all). This has led to some major changes across certain areas of the game – including the removal of some features which were either unpopular or didn’t work as intended.
The biggest change is that touchline shouts are gone. As Jacobson explained, shouts should happen immediately – NOT after the ball has gone out of play. He’s right, you know. How many times have you tried to encourage your team to score a late winner, only for the shout to be delayed until AFTER they score it a few seconds later?
Another complaint was that it wasn’t clear how long shouts actually lasted for. I also believe that FM didn’t do a great job of explaining when best to use each shout, resulting in some FMers spamming “Encourage” or “Demand More” every 10 minutes and ignoring everything else.
That said, some people in the FM community are quite upset that shouts are being taken away. If they believe shouts are that important to how they play the game, I’d argue that’s a sign that they’re not very good tacticians and are reluctant to brush up on their tactical knowledge.
Also, not all elite football managers are big ‘shouters’ like Jürgen Klopp. Take Carlo Ancelotti, who is generally a calm presence in the dugout and often just leaves his players to carry out his game plan.
If touchline shouts are ever to return to FM, SI need to be clearer in terms of what effects each shout have. There also need to be obvious and realistic pros and cons to each shout – not just “Click this button to give everyone a smiley face”.
The meme-able Social Media screen is on its way out too, with some of its information being moved to other screens. Hopefully this means no more immersion-breaking fan reactions, like when you beat Manchester City 5-0 to win the Premier League on the final day and some knucklehead tweets, “Decent win, onto the next one,” or even, “Come on, we weren’t THAT good”.
The chalkboard has also been removed. What’s a chalkboard, I hear you ask?
This is a chalkboard… or at least I think it is. Anyway, this labyrinthian mess of player and team statistics has been made redundant by the much more useful Data Hub.
The popular Fantasy Draft mode won’t be on FM25 at launch, but will instead be part of a mid-cycle feature update, as SI are making major changes with a view to entering the esports scene in 2025. Create-A-Club is being completely rebuilt for FM26 and will not be on FM25 at all (it’s much better to create your own team in the pre-game editor anyway). Neither Challenge Mode nor Versus Mode will be present either.
I appreciate that SI are being more transparent and honest about the development of their game, even if they can’t and won’t tell us everything. This makes a pleasant change from previous years, when they’ve often kept us in the dark – perhaps because any attempts to open up would be greeted with vitriolic personal abuse at developers.
I sincerely hope the fanbase has grown up and doesn’t force SI to backtrack again. Of course, this is the Internet in 2024, so I don’t hold out much hope for that.
A NEW LOOK
Now it’s time for our first look at what will be FM25’s interface. SI have switched to a ’tile and card’ system.
‘Tiles’ are panels that display bits of information, such as a player’s form over their last five matches. These tiles come in various sizes depending on the screen and the resolution, so it could just be a tiny box that displays a player’s average rating – or a larger one with a summary of their last five matches.
Clicking on the tile will open up a larger ‘card’, which will display the information in even more detail. In the example above, the card displays a player’s ratings match-by match, shows which position they played in, and the minutes in which they scored or got an assist.
In recent years, SI have struggled to find a good balance with how much information they display on each screen; they don’t want to overwhelm the player with walls of text and numbers, but they also don’t want blank spaces as large as Taylor Swift’s. The ’tile and card’ system looks promising.
If you’re fed up of receiving loads of pointless emails in your inbox, you’re in luck. The inbox has been phased out in favour of a ‘portal’, which shows your agenda, calendar and messages. This feels more realistic, given that top managers like Pep Guardiola are likely to spend far more time on their phone than browsing emails at their desk.
The interface looks bland and grey at first glance – but it’s important to emphasise that these tiles are taken from design files, NOT a game build. The biggest giveaway is that the current date on the top-right corner is not the same as it is on the calendar. There’s also the fact that none of these dates have a year yet.
I’m not a video game developer, but FM25 is likely in a pre-alpha stage where features are still being built and in-game graphics have not yet been finalised. Think of these ‘screenshots’ as concept art. I’m almost certain the interface will look rather cleaner and more attractive when the game is finished.
Writing off the game at this stage of development is like looking into a restaurant that’s being built or renovated – and concluding that the food’s going to taste like crap. At least wait until the doors have opened first.
If SI stick to their usual release schedule, then the full game will likely come out in early November, with the beta… no, sorry, ‘Early Access’ phase starting in mid-October. That means we’re perhaps about 3 or 4 months away from FM25 being anywhere near ready for extensive play-testing.
However, from September onwards, SI will begin inviting some lucky FMFC members to their studio in east London to test the new interface. I currently live about a 30-minute drive away, but not for much longer, so I won’t be accepting any potential invites.
AND FINALLY…
Early feedback on the new-look FM25 has not exactly been overwhelmingly positive. I’ve seen many people moan on the SI forums and on social media that FM25 looks more like a mobile game than a big-budget PC release.
I cannot understand why – in 2024 – comparing a PC game to something you’d play on your phone or tablet is still a valid criticism. Mobile gaming has come a LONG way since the days of playing Snake on your mum’s old Nokia. The newest iPads might not be designed for Cyberpunk 2077, but they can still handle complex and attractive games.
Jacobson said that FM25 is designed to be “platform agnostic”. Basically, that means it should be equally playable across multiple platforms (e.g. desktops, laptops, mobile devices) and operating systems (Windows, Linux, etc). The game should be just as easy to play with a controller or touchscreen as it is with a mouse.
SI have been working with Unity engineers on this new interface for some time now. Jacobson is likely to explain this ‘journey’ in more detail at the upcoming Unite 2024 conference in Barcelona from 18-20 September.
This new multi-platform design is clearly for the greater good. Unfortunately, some snobbish and/or entitled PC gamers won’t understand this and will argue that SI should cater exclusively to them. This way of thinking is not only elitist – it’s also out of touch with what the video games industry is like now.
FM24 might have shifted 10 million copies, but quite a big chunk of those were on console or mobile. Football Manager is not just a game for sports-mad computer geeks anymore.
And, of course, it’s not just a man’s game anymore. Three years after it was publicly announced as “coming soon”, women’s football will finally be introduced on FM25 – with official competition licences to be announced in due course.
Jacobson has confirmed that you CAN move seamlessly between women’s and men’s teams in the same game world. This is a different approach from We Are Football, where you must decide whether to load male OR female leagues – not both.
More details about the women’s game in FM will be revealed in time, so anything else is just speculation. But I’d imagine that women’s leagues will not be mandatory (i.e. if you load the Premier League, you are not forced to load the WSL as well). I also suspect that female players will have their own 1-20 rating scale, largely separate from male players.
I’ve read some poor takes on the inclusion of women’s football in FM – particularly on the forums. If you have no interest in managing a women’s team, that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean “nobody cares about women’s football”. People need to snap out of this solipsistic mindset.
And please don’t say that SI are “forcing” the women’s game on us because of some “woke” agenda. This is about representing a fast-growing and increasingly popular sport that was undermined by bigoted old men for decades; it’s not about ticking boxes.
In my opinion, Football Manager has felt stale for a few years now – but the new interface, graphics engine and women’s leagues will provide a much-needed update. Excitement will surely grow when more details are revealed in September.
I didn’t plan to write this, but the development update gave me plenty of thoughts that I wanted to share. So thank you for stopping by and reading them.
Fuller FM is now officially on hiatus, but I plan to return in the autumn, when I’ll hopefully be writing about a new Football Manager game in an equally new office. In the meantime, you can occasionally find me on social media @Fuller_FM.
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