Let’s talk about Football Manager 25. Again.
Last week, Sports Interactive’s studio director Miles Jacobson released another Development Update for the next Football Manager game. He also patted everyone on the back after the recent FM World Cup in Liverpool, but who honestly cares about that now?
Anyway, this update is a big one, and Jacobson has some major news about how international management will work in FM25… or, more specifically, how it won’t.
ENSHITTIFICATION
Enshittification is a process where platforms and services gradually degrade, removing features and compromising the user experience. The primary goal for owners/developers is usually (but not always) to seek to extract more profit from their users.
So… it’s time to talk about the enshittification of Football Manager.
For starters, the in-game editor (IGE) has gradually gone up in price – from £3.99 for FM20, to £6.99 for FM24. In that time, there have been few noticeable additions to the IGE, which many FMers use to fix some of the many bugs that might crop up in their saves. They would be better off just buying FMRTE, which costs virtually the same price but offers more features.
The pre-game editor (PGE) is thankfully free of charge, but has been bug-ridden for years – with many modders having to jump through proverbial hoops to create custom leagues and competitions. It also doesn’t help that there is no beta-testing for the PGE, meaning that it is consistently released in a broken state.
From a blogger’s perspective, I am still annoyed that SI removed text match reports for Football Manager 2021. This makes it much more difficult to write my own match reports for my stories – not to mention that searching for a specific highlight is as fun as searching for a needle in the world’s giantest haystack.
Football Manager 25’s big overhaul has taken things a step further – taking out features to streamline the game for a new era on Unity. Some of these are understandable… others less so.
I understand why touchline shouts have been removed, given that they’re often misused and misunderstood by FM players. The Social Media screen was always kinda pointless, and only FM’s nerdiest nerds even knew about the Chalkboard, let alone used it.
Fantasy Draft, Create-A-Club, Challenge Mode and Versus Mode all had their fans and will be missed in some sections of the community. Jacobson spoke about removing features that were used by a small percentage of FM’s player base, so resources could be focussed elsewhere. It’s not ideal, but sometimes needs must.
And now Jacobson has announced that more features are GONE. First off, a player’s weight will no longer be visible on their profile (though weight will still be in the game ‘under the hood’).
FM25 will be the first edition of Football Manager to feature women’s teams. While men’s weights can vary slightly from month to month, women experience more dramatic weight fluctuations more often (for various reasons). SI are maybe also mindful about the potential negative impact displaying a female athlete’s weight could have on her mental health – or indeed that of any young girl or woman who might be playing the game.
It’s also worth noting that a player’s weight has very little impact on how they perform in the match engine. Strength and other physical attributes are much more important. Height is still in the game – but even if it wasn’t, the other attributes still give you a good idea of whether a big striker is built like Peter Crouch or Zlatan Ibrahimović.
But the next big takeaway from that Development Update is much more of a seismic shock…
INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT
“The challenges we’ve encountered in the development process over the last couple of months have led us to make another difficult decision around game content: international management will not be a playable mode in FM25, FM25 Console or FM25 Touch.”
Okay, so… international management has borne the brunt of Football Manager’s enshittification over the past decade.
It started when SI removed the ability to have private chats with your national team players. That means you can’t praise/criticise a player’s last international performance, explain why they’re not in the squad, or even suggest that they should seek a transfer to get more gametime. All that was possible as far back as Football Manager 2013, only to disappear a few years later.
Meanwhile, many features that have been added to club management since 2014 have passed the international game by. Squad dynamics don’t exist in the international game. Neither does training, nor the ability to rest tired players. Staff changes don’t happen either, which means that national teams keep the same coaches year after year (even if they go through multiple managers) and never replace them after they eventually retire.
Back in 2022, I wrote an article about what improvements I’d like to see SI make to international management. Of course, the 2022 World Cup came and went with no international upgrades to FM23. FM24 did get a new-look squad planner, but that’s about it.
And FM25? Well… SI have removed everything. Or at least they’ve taken away the ability to manage a national team, for the first time since it was introduced with Championship Manager 2 (which was released way back in 1995).
“What? You’re telling me that you can’t manage the Lionesses?”
Just to be clear – international football will still be on FM25. World Cups and continental championships will still be played in the background, and your players can still be called up to their national teams. You just won’t be able to manage those teams.
This is not a permanent change, however. Jacobson says that international management “will return in a much more feature-rich way” on Football Manager 26. In other words, SI are taking it away for 12 months, and then repackaging it as something brand new for next year.
In my opinion, this instantly puts FM25 in a permanent state of incompleteness. Football Manager without the ability to manage a national team is like listening to Queen’s greatest hits without John Deacon on bass. The impact might not be as dramatic as removing Freddie (club management), Brian (text commentary) or Roger (horrible newgen faces), but it still won’t sound quite like Queen.
It’s especially disheartening that you can’t manage a women’s national team in the same game that women’s football is being introduced. When it comes to women’s football, the international game is still far more prestigious and high-profile than the club game, so removing the ability to coach a national team makes no sense.
The plan for my long-term FM25 save was to manage the Arsenal women’s team, win the Champions League – and after that, take over England’s Lionesses and win the Women’s World Cup. SI have basically scuppered that plan in one fell swoop.
THE PRECEDENT
As I said earlier, SI have been removing game modes and features that are used by a minority of FMers. Create A Club was used by 5% of players, Versus Mode by 0.5%, and Challenge Mode (an FM Mobile exclusive) by even fewer. Less than 1% of FM24 players used the Chalkboard.
According to SI’s data, ‘only’ 5.6% of FM24 PC saves (not players) have used international management. Over 7 million people have played FM24; we can’t know how many of those were on PC, but let’s assume it’s around 3 million. Then let’s assume that those 3 million PC players have played an average of two saves each.
That gives us a figure of (give or take) 300,000 save games in which the player managed a national team at some point. That doesn’t sound like an insignificant number, does it?
The percentage of players who have managed a national team on FM24 is probably higher than 5.6%. In terms of FM24 players on Steam, 7.1% have the ‘Freedom of the Country’ achievement for winning a continental international tournament. Steam achievements aren’t always reliable, but that suggests international management has more fans than SI’s data suggests.
I appreciate that SI have been stripping out less used features to make the transition to the new Unity game engine smoother. There’s not much point in recreating a part of the game that – ultimately – hardly anybody is going to use.
But this new SI policy sets a dangerous precedent. Will this obsession with percentages mean they continue to remove the least popular modes and features from FM26 and FM27?
Will SI use this policy with the more obscure leagues? If they observe that very few FMers are managing in the Belarusian First League or the Uruguayan Second Division, will those leagues be next for the chopping block?
And what about women’s leagues? If SI’s data for FM25 shows less than 5% of players managing a women’s team (as many naysayers/misogynists think will happen), would they do an about-turn – and concentrate solely on the men’s game for future FMs? Let’s hope that conversation never has to crop up.
Could it even get to the point where SI restrict which teams we manage to the most popular ones? We could be in a situation by Football Manager 30 where you can only manage a team in the ‘Big Five’ leagues – or Wrexham.
Only 0.2% of FM24 players on Steam have got an achievement for playing a save game for 30 seasons. Maybe SI will assume that ultra-long-term saves are pointless and restrict us to just 20 seasons in future, even though infinite saves have been possible since Championship Manager 3!
Alright, that’s all hyperbole and scaremongering… but you understand what I’m getting at, yes?
Now, here’s a question: why has international football got to this point? Is it only played on 5.6% of saves because SI have consistently neglected it for a decade? Or have SI consistently neglected it for a decade because it’s only played on 5.6% of saves? What came first – the chicken or the egg?
To be fair, many people may not be that bothered about international football. They may, however, be more concerned about the other major news that came from Jacobson’s big update.
DELAYS
The official announcement of Football Manager 25 has now been delayed to the end of September, with feature reveals to follow in October. Subsequently, the game’s release has been postponed until late November – rather than the early November release date we’ve increasingly become used to.
Let’s be honest. Moving Football Manager over to Unity was never going to be an entirely smooth process. Sports Interactive’s developers have presumably had to learn on the job, and Jacobson has needed to make some tough decisions, so that FM25 is released in both a timely manner and a playable state.
FMers of a certain age (e.g. Yours Truly) will remember all the excitement about the brand-new 2D match engine on Championship Manager 4, which was supposed to be released in late 2002. After numerous delays, it didn’t come out until the back end of March 2003, when the European football season was almost over.
Young Christopher was still excited to get CM4 just in time for his 13th birthday, but the end product was a buggy mess that not even five ‘Enhancement Packs’ (a fancy name for patches) could salvage. 22 seasons later, I feel like history is repeating itself with FM25.
It doesn’t inspire confidence that Miles has cancelled appearances at a Unite conference in Barcelona and a game show in Tokyo so he can put all his focus on FM25. He’s also cancelled a personal holiday to America (oh woe is him; I’m lucky if I can afford to go to Cambridgeshire every few years!).
Also, we’ve now had TWO development updates – and so far, the focus has been on what is not in FM25, rather than what is. It smells like Sir Keir Starmer telling us that “things will get worse before they get better”.
Jacobson might insist that everything is fine at Sports Interactive, and that their studio in east London is not on fire. But to paraphrase that wise sage Kevin ‘Lollujo’ Chapman, delayed video games rarely turn out as well as expected. Take Cyberpunk 2077, to name just one example.
During CM4’s tumultuous delayed development, Championship Manager 01/02 players were given an update that allowed them to play that game with the 2002/2003 season data. Nowadays, there are plenty of mods (like this one) that update Football Manager 2024 for the 2024/2025 season.
One major issue I have with these updates is that there is no way to change the start date. You might have all the updated leagues and transfers, but the game still starts in the summer of 2023 – and Euro 2024 will still be played all over again after the first season (Yay! Another chance for England to lose another Final!).
Given how problematic FM25 is likely to be, it would be great if SI offered an update for FM24 that allowed you to start from the 2024/2025 season – perhaps as DLC for a reasonable price. That obviously won’t happen, as SI won’t want to undermine their shiny new product right out of the gate.
Look… Football Manager has been stale for a few years. I’m glad it’s finally getting updated for the modern era with modern graphics, and I’ll accept some short-term compromises if it means the series becomes stronger in the long term. Sacrificing international management for FM25 will be a good thing IF it indeed returns in a much better state for FM26.
But although I’m not going to throw my Lego in the lake, I cannot hide my frustration that SI have taken away such a big part of the game – even if it’s only for one year. It feels like the developers have stuck a middle finger up to those FMers who’ve been waiting patiently for their concerns to be addressed.
It would feel egregious if this transitional – and, again, incomplete – version of FM is sold at the same price as FM24 (£45). Heaven forbid that SI or SEGA or whoever jack the price up even more. Unless SI bowl us over with some major positive announcements over the coming months, I’d probably wait for a heavy discount before buying FM25.
In the meantime, FM24 is – as of writing – currently free on the Epic Games Store. I personally did not love FM24, but if you’re concerned about where FM25 is heading (and/or you want to manage your favourite national team), it’s certainly worth snapping up.
So, those are my thoughts on the latest worrying developments about Football Manager 25. If you’d like to add anything to the discussion, feel free to drop a comment below or contact me on Threads @Fuller_FM.
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