Football Manager 2025 is going to be the biggest change the management series for 20 years. Developer Sports Interactive has promised a brand new game engine, better graphics, an entirely new user interface and women’s football for the first time ever.
It has even hinted at a first reveal date for the new game as fans eagerly anticipate the first look at the biggest overhaul of the Football Manager games for decades. Sports Interactive says fans can expect the first big reveal to take place in Q2 in 2024 – and that means June at the latest.
Last year Sports Interactive announced the major changes coming to FM25 with this note: “We’ve had resource on FM25 for some time now, building towards a key milestone at the end of 2023. So, this means we’re aiming for the first major FM25 reveal in Q2 of 2024.”
That means the first reveal should be taking place in the next few months if the studio’s project, named Project Dragonfly, is on time.
In the meantime Sports Interactive has confirmed some of the features of Football Manager.
The first big change comes under the hood. Football Manager 2025 will use an entirely new engine to power it – that means the entire game will be on a different platform and players will instantly notice a new way of navigating the game, a new look and feel to the match engine and graphics, and probably a big leap in the minimum requirements to run the game.
Sports Interactive says: “Everything looks and moves will be far more true-to-life than ever before with FM25.”
There will also be a huge leap forward in stadium and match day graphics. The new engine is called Unity and that is used on some of the world’s biggest blockbuster games. Most interestingly it is the base for Cities Skylines 1 and 2. The game is a city builder similar to SIM City and it looks fantastic, with stunning cityscapes on beautifully detailed maps. The game even features sports stadiums that look just like the real thing.
Graphics may not be as impressive as Cities Skylines but using the powerful Unity engine means we will see a huge step forward in stadium design during the match engine and things like player faces for generated ‘Newgen’ players. It could be the end of the infamous unibrow on your latest wonderkid.
While the game will look fantastic it may mean some players will need an upgrade to their laptops or PCs. Sports Interactive says: ” The switch to Unity means there is the possibility of better-quality graphics across all supported devices, however it should be expected that there will be some changes to the minimum spec requirements, which will be communicated ahead of FM25’s release.”
Finally, the game will include women’s football for the first time. It will allow players to manager women’s club and international sides and switch jobs between women’s and men’s leagues however they wish. The women’s leagues will come with in-depth stats and unique match engine animations.
Unity controversy
So it’s all good news, right?
Yes, to a point. There has been some controversy over the Unity engine in the last year when it announced it would charge developers like Sports Interactive every time the game was downloaded. For Football Manager, which has millions of fans, it would cause a huge cost to the studio that would have to be passed on to players.
Thankfully the backlash to the announcement from game makers caused Unity to shutdown and it seems Sports Interactive has a positive relationship with the game engine creator. It says: “After all our research was concluded, Unity was the clear favourite to take us into an exciting new era for the series.”
