For the first time in its 20-year history, soccer management sim Football Manager will be skipping a year. Football Manager 25, already delayed twice, has been canceled shortly ahead of its proposed March 2025 release date.

In a statement, developer Sports Interactive and publisher Sega said they had decided to shift their focus to the next game in the series after it became clear that FM25 would not be able to hit its quality targets without further delays, which were ruled out.

Football Manager 25 had been envisioned as a major revamp for the series, with Sports Interactive promising the “biggest technical and visual advancement in the series for a generation, laying the building blocks for a new era.” The game was due to introduce better animations, improved UI, and an overhauled match day experience, and to include women’s soccer for the first time.

But Sports Interactive appears to have struggled with the scope of the revamp; it had already taken the unprecedented step of delaying the game past its usual fall release until March, meaning it would miss the lion’s share of the soccer season. The developer had yet to publish a gameplay reveal, and had missed a promised development update in January.

“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, despite the phenomenal efforts of our team,” Sports Interactive said. “Each decision to delay the release was made with the aim of getting the game closer to the desired level but, 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.”

The studio said that releasing the game in its current state and fixing it via patches was “not the right thing to do,” and it ruled out pushing the release date any further back “as it would be too late in the football season to expect players to then buy another game later in the year.” So the decision was taken to skip this entry and concentrate on the next version of the game, presumably due in fall 2025.

“Through the cancellation, every effort is now focused on ensuring that our next release achieves our goal and hits the quality level we all expect,” Sports Interactive said.

Sports Interactive apologized for not communicating the game’s cancellation earlier due to legal and financial regulations stemming from its ownership by Sega, a publicly traded company. It said that players who had already pre-ordered the game would automatically be refunded in full. It also ruled out updating Football Manager 2024 with data from the current season of the sport, as this would be a “substantial undertaking” that would detract from development of the next release.

Football Manager has been published on a strict annual schedule, never later than the end of November, since 2004’s Football Manager 2005. Sports Interactive’s history with soccer management games goes back even further than that — all the way to 1992’s Championship Manager.