It’s March 2025, and after months of eager anticipation, FM25 has finally been released to the public! Well… kind of.
Of course, Football Manager 25 is dead and buried, leaving a huge gap in the market for this season. Could that gap be filled by one of Sports Interactive’s old rivals?
Although EA Sports’ FIFA Manager series was officially cancelled in 2013, the franchise has been kept alive by a devoted community of fans and creators who have been making their own updated databases for the past decade. So today, I will be checking out the 2024/2025 “season update” to see if it’s a worthy replacement for FM25.
This is my review of FIFA Manager 2025.
BACKGROUND
EA Sports produced and published an annual series of football management games – under many different names – from 1997 to 2013. Although EA pulled the plug after FIFA Manager 14, the series still had a strong cult following. Their fanbase was particularly strong in continental Europe – and especially in Germany, where the game was produced for several years.
While FIFA Manager 15 may not have officially existed, users of the French fan forum FIFA Club Manager produced a series of unofficial season updates for FIFA Manager 14. They also work in FIFA Manager 13, which I revisited last year. LFP-FIFA Manager (the LFP is the governing body for Ligues 1 and 2) kept the game alive from 2015 until 2018.
In the summer of 2019, another group of FIFA Manager modders began uploading their own season updates on ModDB – starting with the recently-concluded 2018/2019 season. I’m not sure if they’re related to the LFP-FIFA Manager team, but I do know they have strong links with the German fansite FM-Zocker. (If that name sounds familiar, FM-Zocker also make a real-name mod for We Are Football, which I have also covered here before.)
And they’ve been going strong ever since. A new season update usually comes out every January or February, with occasional updates and hotfixes coming out later. FIFA Manager 2025 was a bit late this year (heh heh), coming out on 8 March.
But even though I’ve been calling them “season updates”, they’re much more than that. That’s because they don’t just update the teams and leagues – they also update 2D and 3D graphics, fix some significant bugs in the original game, and make other big gameplay changes.
If you thought Daveincid’s Football Manager updates were great, you haven’t seen anything yet!
Of course, you will need to install a copy of either FIFA Manager 13 or FIFA Manager 14 to use this mod. If you don’t, then I’m afraid to say that CD keys for those games are now very rare AND very expensive – and that you might have to find the game by other (perhaps legally dubious) means.
STARTING OUT
Before installing FIFA Manager 2025, you will have to download the base files from ModDB. The first two components (the Main Pack and 2D Graphics pack) are absolutely necessary. The XXL Portrait Pack is optional, and you’ll only need the 3D Graphics Pack and Extended 3D Stadiums Pack if you want to play matches in 3D.
Unzip the downloaded files using WinRAR or 7-Zip – and make sure you unzip them all into the same folder. Once there, open up the “FIFA Manager 2025” folder, launch the fm2025-installer.exe application, and then follow the instructions to update your FIFA Manager game.
Once you’ve installed the game, you’ll quickly notice some improvements. For starters, you can now launch the game on its own without having to run the EA App first. You can also load as many leagues as you like, though you will be warned in advance if your computer doesn’t have enough memory to cope with them all.
And just how many leagues are playable on FIFAM 2025? I counted at least 527 leagues across 125 nations – from El Salvador to Syria, from the 4th division of Iceland to the 3rd tier in Kazakhstan! In England, you can manage teams as low down as the 8th tier – in the Isthmian, Southern and Northern Premier Leagues!
You can also choose to manage any national team in the game – and I mean pretty much any national team. If you want to manage AFC Telford United and American Samoa at the same time, FIFAM 25 will be right up your street!
If you’ve previously managed any of the later FIFA Manager titles, you should get to grips with this game pretty easily. Even if you haven’t, there are plenty of options in-game to manage as much or as little as you want. Matches can be played in ‘Text Mode’, ‘Instant Result’, ‘Teletext Mode’ or even the much-improved ‘3D Mode’, which I’ll touch on later.
WHAT I LIKED
I don’t like the new ‘Swiss system’ used in UEFA competitions such as the Champions League. It’s an unfair, unbalanced money grab that leads to more meaningless matches. Yet I’m absolutely blown away with how well it’s been implemented on FIFAM 25.
There are loads of complicated rules that dictate how the league phase matches are organised (e.g. seeding pots, even numbers of home/away matches, can’t play a team from your nation). Football Manager does this quite well already, with a few caveats… but as far as I can tell, FIFAM 25 gets it pretty much spot-on. It shows just how much effort and attention these modders have put into their work that they’ve got this format working like clockwork on a game that’s now over a decade old.
Of course, this update isn’t just Euro-centric. There has been a major overhaul of Asia’s continental competitions, and so the AFC Champions League Elite, Champions League Two and Challenge League are all present on FIFAM 25. The game also has national coefficients for AFC and CAF competitions, which work just like they do in UEFA – with more successful countries getting more teams entered into continental events.
Other changes have been made under the hood which affect player development, so your young talents grow at more realistic rates. And given how much player salaries and transfer fees have ballooned in the past 12 years, this has also been reflected in the update.
The database itself is pretty beefy, if not quite to the same extent as FM’s. Alongside those 500+ leagues, there are over 225,000 players. This figure even includes real-life youth players as young as 14 – such as the highly-rated Arsenal midfielder Max Dowman, who won’t be old enough to appear on FM until the 2026/2027 season!
Then there are those small ‘quality of life’ features that weren’t in the original game. You can play the game in windowed mode, or in a ‘Dark Mode’ skin (though I actually prefer the lighter version, personally). There’ve also been improvements to optimisation and stability. Although I did see a few minor graphical glitches when alt-tabbing between the game and other programs, I didn’t encounter a single crash while writing this review.
WHAT I DIDN’T
Honestly? Most of the gripes I have were already issues that I had on the vanilla version of FIFA Manager 13.
I’m talking about things like your players being overly-sensitive primadonnas who “can’t understand” why you made them do penance training after they lost 3-0 at home to Augsburg. Or having to manage the stadium infrastructure yourself because your club’s general manager stupidly thinks that 20 toilets are enough for 60,000 spectators. No, seriously, I’m not joking.
In terms of issues specific to this update, there’s not much to moan about. The FA Cup Final being scheduled for a Wednesday night is a bit of an immersion-breaker… but other than that?
I will say that managerial movements on this game are very weird – especially in the lower leagues. It’s hard to imagine Lee Bowyer coaching Leganés in real-life, or David James taking over at Birmingham, or even Owen Hargreaves binning off TNT Sports to manage Cheltenham. The most bizarre appointment I’ve seen was Stoke hiring Hikmat Fuzaylov, whose last job was managing the Tajikistan Under-16s team!
I also saw Sir Alex Ferguson come out of retirement at the age of 83 to manage United… Newcastle United. And apparently, Liverpool are Fergie’s favourite club! Are the developers absolutely sure that they didn’t get Sir Alex mixed up with another Scottish knight of the realm?
WE MUST TALK ABOUT…
The match engine. I’m a ‘Text Mode’ loyalist when it comes to FIFA Manager, but considering that there have been significant updates to 3D graphics, I thought I’d give ‘3D Mode’ a go for some of my team’s bigger matches.
And the 3D on this game is… fine. This still looks and plays like a mid-2010s FIFA game, with all the usual quirks and bewildering AI logic.
But it’s great to see all the graphics updated for the 2024/2025 season. If you downloaded all the 3D graphics, you’ll see that around 3,000 kits, 6,000 player faces and 1,000 stadiums are represented in all their 3D glory. The TV graphics, the match balls and even the sponsor boards look authentic too!
Of course, there are some limitations as to how far this overhaul goes. You have the usual uninspiring FIFA commentary from Clive Tyldesley and Andy Townsend, which doesn’t always link up with what happens on the pitch.
The commentators also don’t mention any players or clubs by their correct names – which is no surprise, given most of today’s stars were still in school when these commentary lines were recorded. I did, though, hear Tyldesley once refer to my centre-forward Deniz Undav as ‘Ibrahimovic’. He also called my team ‘Manchester United’ more than once during a Bundesliga match.
I’ll probably stick with old-fashioned text if I start a long-term save on FIFAM 25, but 3D mode is certainly tolerable. Just make sure you go into the settings and turn off the commentary first. It’s not for me, Clive.
SUMMARY
I am truly in awe of what the folks at FM-Zocker have done with this FIFA Manager update. As well as providing updated squads and competitions for the current season, they have also fixed many of the bugs and technical issues that held the vanilla game back.
FIFA Manager 2025 might not be an official EA Sports release, but it looks pretty damn close to a shiny new game. If you’re lucky enough to already own a copy of FIFA Manager 13 or 14, I would absolutely give this update a go. It’s free, it’s thorough – and best of all, it wasn’t made by EA!
FULLER FM RATING: 4.5* – Champions League.
As Barry Davies would put it, “You have to say that’s magnificent.”
If you’re a new visitor to Fuller FM, I usually write about Football Manager on here, though I occasionally review other football management games from past and present. 4.5* is actually the highest review score I’ve ever given out, so I’d love to cover FIFA Manager 2025 again in the near future.
If you have any save ideas or challenges you think I should try, please leave a comment below. You can also find me on Threads and BlueSky. Feel free to share your overall thoughts on the update as well.
Thanks for reading.
Fuller FM 