With Football Manager 25 finally announced, we bring you everything you need to know about the new Football Manager edition, including all the news about new features and game upgrades, how much Football Manager 25 will cost, how to pre-order FM25, as well as giving you all the latest news about the coming game.
Football Manager 25 or FM25 by Sports Interactive is the first game in a new era of football management. As the development of FM25 has been a long-term process starting already in the Covid-pandemic, fans of Football Manager has been eagerly anticipating the very first news on Football Manager 25 for months!
Now finally, the time of its release is closing in!
With huge changes to the interface, Women’s football introduced for the first time in the Football Manager series, and major improvements to the graphics, Football Manager 25 brings a new legacy after two decades of innovations.
FM25 is year one of the new era for football management. Feed your obsession for the beautiful game in a football universe where only you define your destiny.
With Football Manager 25 announced yesterday, it gives us a great opportunity for us to provide you with all the information about what to expect from Football Manager 25 featuring the first look at FM25! Here we’ll be able to showcase the very first screenshots of Football Manager 25 along with news about when Football Manager 25 will be released, new features and other game upgrades, as well as how much you need to pay to get your hands on Football Manager 25!
Table of Contents
After the incredible success of Football Manager 2024 which sold over 10 million copies, there are huge expectations ahead of Football Manager 25 and its major changes to the game play and number of improvements.
With around two months away the long-anticipated release of Football Manager 2025, it’s time to take a closer look at what to expect from Football Manager 2025!
Over the next couple of chapters we will give you a closer look at Football Manager 2025 and everything we know about the new Football Manager 2025 game.
We will update this post with more FM25 news as soon as they are announced, so you can get all the latest information about the coming changes to Football Manager 2025, and its release!
Football Manager 25 Release Date
October 10th, 2024 Sports Interactive published a statement revealing that Football Manager 25 will be postponed until March 2025.
According to the statement, further news about FM25 features and gameplay will start to rollout in January 2025 – approximately two months until the game’s release.
Football Manager 25 [PC/MAC], FM25 Console (Xbox/PS5) and FM25 Mobile (Netflix) is set to debut November 26, 2024, as revealed in the official announcement of Football Manager 25 yesterday. According to the roadmap, further news about new features and gameplay will rollout in the following weeks until the release of Football Manager 25 towards the end of November.
The delay of Football Manager 25 is now the second postponement of the game.
Normally the game has been announced in the late August / beginning of September with a release date set to late October/early November. However, due to the complexity of, and with the move to, the Unity engine, the timeline for Football Manager 25 has been forced to be changed – resulting in the release of Football Manager 25 to be later than usual.
Learn more about why Sports Interactive has made the difficult decision to delay Football Manager 25 release until March 2025.
Football Manager 25 Release Date: March 2025
How much will Football Manager 25 cost? Price and pre-order offers on FM25?
Although a number of major changes are arriving to FM25, will the price on Football Manager 25 be identical to FM24. This year, the game will be released in a number of different versions.
Following is quick list of the available versions of Football Manager 25, and it’s price(s);
- The Original Football Manager 25 [PC/MAC]: EURO
€59.99 / UK £44.99 / USD $59.99NOT YET KNOWN - Football Manager 25 Console [Xbox One/S/X & PlayStation 5]: NOT YET KNOWN
- Football Manager 25 Touch [Nintendo Switch]: NOT YET KNOWN
- Football Manager 25 Mobile [Netflix]: Requires Netflix Subscription
If you pre-purchase Football Manager 25 [PC/MAC] from a SEGA-approved digital retailer you will net a 10% discount, if you pre-purchase FM25 before the release date.
*Pre-orders for FM25 Console (Xbox/PS5) will launch at a later date.
* Players across all FM25 titles will be able to carry forward save games from the corresponding FM24 release, with save game compatibility now introduced to our Mobile series for the first time.
Football Manager 2025 Features We Want
Here’s the ultimate FM25 feature wishlist as we have got onboard several significant FM Community members to share their thoughts on how Football Manager 2025 can be improved. Continue reading…
New Football Manager 25 Features We Know About
Official Licence of The Premier League
Screenshot of the licenced teams in the Premier League on Football Manager 25 – showcasing real Premier League logos and player photos of Premier League teams.
On the 10th of June 2024, it was announced that Football Manager would get the official Premier League licence. Gone are the days of Man UFC saga and the experience of managing in the English Premier League will be more immersive than ever before!
From the 2024/25 season, all 20 Premier League clubs will be fully licensed in future FM releases with official logos, kits, and player photos featuring across the entire FM-series.
Expect further information about the Premier League’s in-game integration with Football Manager and the partnership activities between the league and Sports Interactive coming later this year.
Women’s Football introduced to FM25
One of the first Football Manager 2025 features we can look forward to is the introduction of Women’s Football coming for Football Manager 2025, for the first time in the game’s history. We need to head back to 2021 when this was first announced but it’s now becoming the reality.
Over the last few years the studio has been working on the major project of adding Women’s Football to Football Manager and it’s been perhaps a longer process than anticipated to include women’s football in the game. Even though Sports Interactive was beaten by EA Sports FC 24 to include women’s leagues into a football management game by acquiring the licence for the National Women’s Soccer League and let you play with some of the biggest women’s football stars in EA Sports, the creators behind Football Manager 25 has spent years researching female footballers and leagues to try to perfectly reflect the female stars skills and give you the most accurate squads.
In Football Manager 25 you’ll be able to move seaminglessly between managing men’s and women’s clubs and vice-versa in one world, one ecosystem.
Women’s football on Football Manager 25 will let you manage any teams across several leagues with a database size of 25,000 players and staff.
With the introduction of female players on FM25, the developers of Football Manager has decided to remove player’s weight from all player profiles in Football Manager 25.
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.
FM25 Development Update – Miles Jacobson
Further news about Women’s fotball in Football Manager 25 is set to arrive in the week of October 7th.
A screenshot of the player profile of a female player on Football Manager 25.
Women’s Leagues Licences
How many Women’s leagues and what licences Sports Interactive has acquired is yet to know but according to recent news SI has secured multiple licenses for FM25 and they are sure more will follow in the future.
However, since Sports Interactive acquired the licences of the UEFA competitions ahead of FM24, we can hope the game also has similar licences for the UEFA Women’s Champions League.
“The hard work doesn’t stop here, though. There’s a lot more to come from us over the next few years, starting with FM25 and all that means with the move to Unity and introduction of Women’s Football. We’ve been releasing games for 33 years but what we’re doing now is setting things up for the next 30, where we expect to continue to innovate for decades to come.”Sports Interactive on breaking the milestone of best-selling game ever in the series
Unity Graphics Engine Introduced in FM25
One of the greatest additions to Football Manager 2025 will be the introduction of the brand new Unity Graphics Engine. This will become one of the most revolutionizing changes to Football Manager for years! We’re talking at the same level the 3D Match engine was added to FM09!
According to SI, the current graphics engine running behind the match engine has not had a major revamp since 2017 and the game has suffered since then from using a ‘outdated’ technology which didn’t managed to keep up with the pace of the rapid technological advancements in the industry.
With the game now being released on more platforms than ever before, Sports Interactive has worked on improving the backend technology that has made Football Manager into what it is.
So for Football Manager 2025, the Unity Engine will be used for the first time in the game’s series! The Unity Engine will come to the classic version of Football Manager 2025, FM25 Console and FM25 Touch*.
As Football Manager 25 is now powered by the Unity engine, you can expect smoother and more realistic animations, more detailed visual graphical enhancements and better performance whilst playing the game.
FM25 promises vastly improved in-game animations for a more immersive experience based on enhanced realism.
The switch to the Unity Engine is a remarkable change I’m sure we all will notice once loading FM25 for the first time. By using one of the most powerful industry-leading game development platforms for Football Manager you will experience a brand new user interface to the game but that graphics both inside and outside matchdays is severily upgraded.
When we know the Unity Engine has been used to deliver games like Pokémon Go, Call of Duty:Mobile, the Cities Skyline series and the open-world, action role-playing game Genshin Impact – which gives you a similar look and feel as the Legend of Zelda game series – the possibilities for FM25 will be endless!
In the simpliest term, the Unity engine offers the opportunity to add more powerful user interface tools which will enhance how you navigate through the different screens and access information available to you.
We’ve been working closely with Unity over the last few years to be able to deliver a whole new UI which will dramatically improve the ways you are able to interact with the game, both inside and outside of a matchday. Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline (URP) allows us to create more optimal graphics across a range of platforms, from mobile to high-end consoles and PC/Mac – but we’re also adding some enhancements on top.The Future of Football Manager, Sports Interactive
In this instance, we can expect that long-gone are screens with all-in-one information with different tabs that let you get more in-depth information and instead have a more intuitive way of presenting data.
The reality might be that skins and panels are a thing of the past and that we’ll be able to move across the game as if we were walking around the club’s training ground in an open-world football club environment where you walk into the Manager Office, Dressing Room and interact with players in a more 3D experience all across the game.
Even though this is just a dream, the reality is that with the switch to the Unity Engine the current look and feel of the match engine and everything surrounding the matchdays will be improved. We can expect to see stadium environments and everything related to the stadium graphics being improved for FM25.
Perhaps the switch to the Unity Engine will offer us the chance to custom-build new stadiums and watch the new stadium being build or upgraded with a scenomatic overview of the process – just like we would expect to see upgrades of buildings and environments in other gaming genres.
For FM24, we could experience the very first jump towards the enhancements relating to match engine improvements and graphical enhancements with a greater focus on ball physics and player locomotion. This will further be improved for FM25 by continuing the effort into making the game a truer reflection of real-life football with new animations based on a new animation technology. These improvements will also be evident in the surrounding scenes of the whole Match Day experience on FM25.
Read more about Volumetric Player Animations on Football Manager 25, which will enhance the authencity of gameplay experience within the FM25 match engine.
On top of that, its introduction will opening up the opportunity to dramatically improve how newgen faces look and the quality of the faces generated, such as in the case of manager creation by offering more realism and depth.
In the end, it will open the possibility of better-quality graphics across all supported devices of Football Manager – from the console version of the game to the fully-fledged career game and multiplayer modes.
NB! FM25 Mobile will be the only platform that won’t benefit from the switch to the Unity Engine but may be incorporated to a future version of FM Mobile.
The New User Interface of Football Manager 25
One of the first significant changes to FM25 is the drastic changes to the game’s user interface. Along with that, the user experience will also be very different from what you’ve gotten used to.
The new UI for FM25 is built with a powerful design and a technical foundation that can be scaled and improved for the future. You can expect to see the user experience being strengthen for any future additions of the game without compromising the consistency of the user interface.
The difficulty has always been at balancing the way Football Manager should deliver key information at the right time without overwhelming the player and make it user friendly regardless of whether you are playing with a mouse and keyboard, controller or even a touch screen.
For FM25, the game developers and technical staff has worked with the engineers at Unity to adapt their engine to give us the flexibility and dynamics needed from a UI perspective.
Screenshot of the new and improved club overview interface on Football Manager 25.
The New Tiles & Cards UI/UX for FM25
For Football Manager 25, the new UI/UX system will be driven by what Sports Interactive entitles as a “Tile and card” system.
The “Tiles” are panels of information with multiple different “states” which ranges in different sizes, from small amount of information to larger “cards” which contains more material and further detail. This is done to build a sense of exploration for every player to reveal the depth and detail of Football Manager.
With tiles and cards SI can display appropriate information in various different screens and scenarios.
Below is an example of a Player Form tile in different “states” to provide you with more important context. If you click on the form tile, you will open up a card with more information about the player’s form.
The idea behind “tiles” and “cards” is to reduce the volum of screens in-game to try to make navigation easier without compromising the detail level.
To help you understand the potential of the new Cards and Tile system, here’s a screenshot of the new in-between match highlights*.
More information on how it all works will follow during Sports Interactive’s gameplay rollout in October.
Replacing Inbox with News Portal
The Inbox has always been your main source of information with in-game emails delivered to your inbox as messages. For FM25, the Inbox screen will be re-modelled into what they call the Portal.
This change of name aims to represent how we access information and news via our phones rather than laptops. Through the Portal you will get a richer window to the footballing universe with better tools to develop your story through the Agenda and Messages sections.
The Portal will also deliver more insight into what’s happening elsewhere via News and Matches – making the Portal a one stop place for all your manager businesses whether you wish to look at your squad, look for new recruitments or get information about ehat’s going on around you.
Revamped Tactics Creation on Football Manager 25
Coming soon…
New Player Roles (In & Out of Possession?)
This screenshot of a female player reveals the new player role Channel Forward.
Improved Match Experience
Coming soon…
Your Manager
Coming soon…
Other Changes for Football Manager 2025
Transfer Saved Games From FM24 to FM25
For FM24, the ability to transfer saved games from FM23 to FM24 was first introduced. According to the information from SI about the future of Football Manager this feature will continue – letting you transfer your FM24 saved games into FM25.
For the first time in the history, players across all FM25 titles will be able to carry forward save games from the corresponding FM24 release, with save game compatibility now introduced to FM25 Mobile series, as well!
READ MORE | Play Football Manager 2024 as if it was FM25 – Download the 2024-25 League Update Database
Future Game Updates to Football Manager 2025
One of the news that might have been overshadowed by the major changes coming to Football Manager 2025 in terms of the new graphics engine and the prospect of shifting seamlessly between managing women’s and men’s team on Football Manager 2025 is the groundbreaking news about future game updates.
Once Football Manager 2025 is released, you can expect for the future more regular mid-cycle feature releases – meaning that the game will evolve with new improvements to the game, far more often.
So far, the Football Manager game has been updated twice a year after the vanilla version is out – with a patch being released around two weeks before Christmas and the main data update featuring all the winter transfer updates fixed at the end of February. Now, on top of these regular game updates, Sports Interactive is able to update the game far more often with the move to the Unity Graphics engine.
This means bug fixes and new additions to the game can happen more regularly than before.
Removed Features for FM25
As you might be aware of, Sports Interactive collects unanoumous data about how you play the game and what areas of the game you use. After consideration the work load of updating, revamping and re-modelling several parts of the game under the new Unity graphics enginge, the developers at Sports Interactive has decided to make several changes to FM25 that means that some features or game modes won’t be immediately available for Football Manager 25.
Beneath is a quick list of what’s been removed. Some of these might be brought back in future iterations of Football Manager in order for the game developers to properly implement these features and modes in the best possible way.
- Touchline Shouts won’t be back to the series for the forseeable future but may be added to the game if or when Sports Interactive is able to make them work properly.
- Social Media Screen is taken out and instead incorporated into the game in other game areas as supporters are still an integral part of the game.
- Data Chalkboard is another area that will be gone for FM25. With data metrics and visualisations a major part of the game, how you analyze your team and your players has become superfluous for many of you. Personally, I favour to analyze my team’s performance and look at players individual performance from specific matches, so removing Data Chalkboard will be another feature that’s greatly missed!
- Create-A-Club will be brought back for Football Manager 26 with lots of changes and improvements as the current experience of Create-A-Club can’t be improved in the way they want it to appear for FM25.
- Versus Mode is used by 0.5% of the audience and because of that Sports Interactive is looking at either to supersude it by something else or return it in a completely different format one time in the future.
- Challenge Mode is scheduled to return completely revamped for either Football Manager 26 or Football Manager 27. However, sicne it’s only used by under 0.5% of the audience, the game developers has prioritized other parts of the game for FM25 release.
- Fantasy Draft will be significantly improved and is scheduled to return for FM25 as a mid-cycle feature. This means that Fantasy Draft won’t be playable from day one. However, Fantasy Draft will be brought bak to the series bigger and better than ever! Learn more in the chapter about the new FIFA eSports Activities.
- On September 9th, it was confirmed that International Management won’t be playable for Football Manager 25, FM25 Console or FM25 Touch. Instead, it will be available on FM25 Mobile as that’s on a different development track and codebase. However, International Management will continue to exist in the game, but you won’t be able to manage a National team. International Management will return on FM26, FM26 Console or FM26 Touch in a much more feature-rich way!
For more information about Football Manager 25, get to know the Football Manager 2025 timeline of feature reveals and first screenshots in the announcement of FM25.
