Football Manager 25 has been delayed until late November, as the developers wrestle with the game’s new engine.

FM25 will see a major overhaul of the game, delivering an entirely new graphics system based on the Unity engine and including women’s football for the first time.

However, the game’s regular early November launch date has slipped, with the developers needing extra time to polish the game.

“The FM25 development cycle has been challenging for the whole team,” writes Miles Jacobson, studio director of Sports Interactive, which makes the Football Manager games.

“We knew that moving the entire game to the Unity engine was going to be a complex endeavor. As we’ve gotten deeper into the process and gained learnings, it’s fair to say it’s been trickier than we originally anticipated.”

The game’s precise launch date will be announced in late September.

FM25 Features Dropped

The grapples with the new game engine will also see some features that have been in previous versions omitted.

The big one is international football management, which won’t be a playable option in FM25. ”Coming off the back of a summer of tournament football and with this week even being an international break, we’ve looked really hard at international management in FM and determined that what we were planning to deliver wouldn’t reach our initial quality threshold,” said Jacobson.

“So, rather than delay FM25 even further, we’ve paused work on that area of the game and allocated those resources to other key areas.”

Jacobson claims save data reveals that only 5.6% of Football Manager players bother with the international management mode, which has long been one of the weaker aspects of the game.

International football will still be in the game, but players won’t be able to take charge of countries as they can do currently.

It will also continue to be a part of FM25 Mobile, which isn’t being ported to the new graphics engine.

Another feature that won’t be in FM25 is player weights. Current player stats include the height and weight of a player, but the addition of women’s football in FM25 has led the developers to reconsider these listings.

“Through the creation of our Women’s Football database, we discovered that while the weight of male athletes can change a bit month to month, women’s body types are very different from men’s and their weight fluctuates a lot more, often weekly,” said Jacobson.

He added that “a very basic measurement” of weight will still be included “under the hood,” but this won’t be visible to players.

It’s hard to tell what – if any – impact a player’s weight had on their performance anyway, with other linked metrics such as pace, acceleration and strength giving a much clearer insight into a player’s physical condition.