Football Manager 2025 has been delayed until March 2025. This means football fans don’t have a new iteration of the series to play alongside the real-world football season, and many players have been wondering whether Sports Interactive could instead release a data update for Football Manager 2024.
Alas, SI say they’ve looked into it, and it just isn’t possible.
“Following the announcement of the delay to FM25, many of you have called for an official FM24 update with season 2024/25 data. This is something we have been exploring since the initial internal conversation about postponing the game’s release,” begins the statement shared on social media.
“Having now scoped the work that would be required, and despite a good initial response from many of our licensors, we cannot lift assets that we are using in FM25 and make them work in FM24 without recreating them in full. The same applies to the many competition rules, translations and database changes that cannot be back ported. The updated assets and data would both be required to obtain licensor approval – they cannot be separated.
“This is a substantial undertaking which would take critical resources away from delivering FM25 to the highest possible quality, which we simply cannot compromise on.”
I’m honestly surprised – but pleased – that Sports Interactive explored the potential of an update, and publicly acknowledged that they had. I assume a modder will step in to the fill the void, if they haven’t already, as far as the bundled database editor allows.
Football Manager 2025 has been delayed several times because it’s aiming to be the series’ first “true sequel” in decades, according to Sports Interactive. The series is moving over to Unity, rather than an in-house engine, to pave the way for a new generation of updates – although SI seem keen that people lower their expectations for FM2025 itself.