Sports Interactive has announced that the 2025 version of Football Manager, its popular video game series, has been cancelled.

A statement from its British developer Sports Interactive said that “following extensive internal discussion and careful consideration” with licensor and partner Sega, it would not be running an edition this current year.

In September, Sports Interactive pushed back an early November release date to later that month, before in October saying that the game’s release would be delayed until March 2025.

“Due to a variety of challenges that we’ve been open about to date, and many more unforeseen, we currently haven’t achieved what we set out to do in enough areas of the game,” the Sports Interactive statement read.

“As we approached critical milestones at the turn of the year, it became unmistakably clear that we would not achieve the standard required, even with the adjusted timeline.”

Sports Interactive added that the company will now “shift our focus to the next release.”

Sports Interactive regret to inform that, following extensive internal discussion and careful consideration with SEGA, we have made the difficult decision to cancel Football Manager 25. pic.twitter.com/tLRbq8305K

— Football Manager (@FootballManager) February 7, 2025

Football Manager has been among the most prominent football video games on the market for more than two decades.

Unlike the EAFC (formerly known as FIFA) franchise, which is primarily played on consoles, Football Manager was popularised as a desktop-computer video game. Instead of directing the players’ fortunes directly with a video-game controller, players assume the role of an old-school manager — signing players, assigning and hiring coaching staff, and setting up the team — with little direct input once the team’s matches kicked off.

The game began in 1992, under the title Championship Manager, and was an annual release for each football season, before a split with original publishers Eidos Interactive in February 2004 led to Sports Interactive — which lost the naming rights but retained the game engine (the basic software) and data — rebranding the game as Football Manager with a new publisher Sega, with the first version released in 2005.

Football Manager has been an annual series since, with Sports Interactive saying in February last year that the 2024 version was its most popular yet with seven million players.

(Top photo: Football Manager)