Football Manager 2025 is the biggest change to the world’s best football management game for over a decade.
Sports Interactive has confirmed it will be moving to an entirely new game engine for FM25 when it goes on sale in the second half of the year and that means a complete overhaul of how the game looks and feels. The move to the Unity engine means better-looking player faces, user interface and club stadiums.
Interestingly, there are already some hints about what the game may be capable of because people have designed and built stadiums in Unity engine before and they have appeared in popular games including city builder Cities Skylines 1 and 2.
READ MORE: FOOTBALL MANAGER 2025 REVEAL DATE NEARS: EVERYTHING WE KNOW SO FAR
Let’s begin with a caveat; Football Manager is its own game with its own developers, designers and licenses. The stadiums it will create for the new match engine could look completely unique. But the fact that we do have stadiums built within the engine itself does show what the engine is capable of – and the results are spectacular.
Cities Skylines features beautiful cityscapes and the stadiums overlooking grand riversides and bays, nestled amongst skyscrapers and forming vast sports districts look superb. Modders have created stadiums that look unique for a host of sports and, importantly, there are also officially licensed stadiums for some of Europe’s top clubs.
Take a look at the designs of Barcelona’s Nou Camp, Juventus’ Stadium and Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge and see how the detailed models are a massive upgrade on those currently on the Football Manager 2024 game.
These were officially-licensed stadiums for the game, as announced on the Barcelona website. The press announcement says: “The European Club Pack works in concert with the free “Match Day” expansion which was released for free in June 2016, which allows players to build massive sports venues into their cities and reap added revenue while handling the new challenges of game-day traffic. Now, in-game crowds can flock to see their favorite football clubs in action and enjoy a day at the arena in style.”
The idea that the new engine is capable of showing more of the match day experience than current Football Manager is an exciting one and could potentially open up the door for future additions to the game ranging from fan parks to dramatic coach welcomes for European nights.
What about the actual match day experience? The Cities Skylines stadiums are really designed to appear in city vistas but there is evidence of spectacular stadiums being designed in great detail in the Unity engine.
Fans have even demonstrated perfect replicas of iconics stadiums such as Wembley, showing intricately designed stands with individual seats, press boxes and tunnels all in place.
This would be the dream of most Football Manager fans. New stadiums built through Unity can help to build that big match atmosphere that the game sometimes lacks. If it looks anything like existing stadiums built using Unity it will be a huge hit for players when the game finally arrives.
