29 June 2023 , 18:00
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The future of the Football Manager series has been revealed, with changes for FM24 and a major overhaul for FM25.
Sega and Sports Interactive's Football Manager series has been a huge success since the original Football Manager 2005 launched (and even before then with the Championship Manager series under Eidos), and since then the folks at Sports Interactive have built the series into one of the most beloved PC games of all time.
Yearly series' often get flak for the lack of meaningful iteration from year to year and Football Manager 2023 was no different, despite the launch of a new FM23 console version for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. This has spurred Miles Jacobson – Director at Sports Interactive – to pen a blog post which not only acknowledges some of the criticism towards FM23, but sets out what the future of the series holds. Jacobson admitted "The FM23 feature set wasn’t what we’d wanted to deliver" before elaborating that "A few months before release we faced the reality of having to drop a few features that we’d wanted to introduce to ensure we were able to deliver a working game".
Clearly the reception from the hardcore fans about to FM23 was taken on board as FM24 is set to be 'the last of its kind'. The post states "The vast majority of the team at Sports Interactive are working on FM24, with the idea that it will inarguably be the most complete version of Football Manager to date" and that "It’s a love letter to football and the FM series as we know it".
The post didn't go into complete detail about what's new for the 20th edition of Football Manager, however, Jacobson did let us know that one of the most requested features in the history of the series will debut in FM24 – the ability to transfer saved games from one version of FM to the next.
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FM25 revamped features
The post later went on to detail what makes FM25 unique enough to make FM24 the last of it's kind. First and foremost every version of FM25 (be it PC, console, or mobile) will run on a new engine called Unity, which Jacobson claims is "going to give us a lot more power graphically, across all formats, alongside powerful user interface tools". He later goes on to elaborate that the jump to unity will allow the team to take a bigger jump with in-game animations, saying that "the way that everything looks and moves will be far more true-to-life than ever before with FM25". This should mean that the strange appearances you often see with new gens should be a thing of the past in FM25.
Finally, the post ended off with the confirmation that Women's football will finally be brought to Football Manager with FM25, after announcing intent to integrate it back in 2021, citing 'legal issues' as the biggest hurdle. When the project was first announced, Jacobson was keen to stress that Instead of simply attaching a ponytail to the existing male 3D models, re-using male animations or even using the same attributes as male players, the studio would be undertaking a huge multi-year project to make sure that women's footballers in the game will be represented as accurately as possible.