Football Manager 2025 is delayed and will not have international teams

An update for Football Manager 2025 has revealed the game has been delayed, there will be no international management and player weights will not be included.

Football Manager is a long standing football simulation series where players can live out their dreams of managing their favourite football clubs or creating their own legacies by rising through the ranks with ones lower down the pecking order from a number of different countries.

It's a deeply tactical game in which players are tasked with managing a team top to bottom, including transfers, coaching sessions, tactics, player fallouts and everything else in between.

Players look forward to the new annual version each year with all the latest player updates, transfers, club promotions and relegations and loads more.

But fans will have to wait a bit longer than previously thought for Football Manager 2025.

Miles Jacobson OBE, studio director at Sports Interactive, said: "We've had to shift the official announcement of FM25 to the end of September. The gameplay focus period will follow soon thereafter.

"Our target launch date has moved accordingly and is now scheduled for late November, rather than our usual early November slot."

The game is being moved into a new engine called Unity which is why the game has been delayed.

"As we've gotten deeper into the process and gained learnings, it's fair to say it's been trickier than we originally anticipated," said Jacobson.

He provided an update on gameplay features in the new iteration of the annual title which have also been affected.

"International management will not be a playable mode in FM25, FM25 Console or FM25 Touch," Jacobson revealed. It will remain in FM25 Mobile.

"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."

International management will return in a bigger way for the 2026 edition, ahead of the FIFA World Cup, Jacobson confirmed.

Player weights will also be taken out of the game.

Jacobson explained: "From a gameplay perspective, being able to move seamlessly between managing men's and women's clubs and vice-versa in one world, one ecosystem was the number one priority - but that's forced us to consider how various game world aspects are currently portrayed.

"As such, we can now share a change we've made to all FM25 player profiles: a player's weight will no longer be visible.

"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."

In the meantime, to keep fans busy, Football Manager 2024 is the latest iteration which released in November 2023 and just 10 months on from release, it will soon be available to download and keep for free.

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