Why FM25 cancellation had to happen!

Miles Jacobson opens up about the leap into the unknown

Yesterday saw a wave of coverage for Football Manager, as three major outlets — Eurogamer, The Athletic, and BBC Newsbeat — all published features with Sports Interactive’s Miles Jacobson. The community had been anticipating this moment ever since a BBC journalist hinted at possible stories six weeks ago in a post on the FM Scout Facebook page.

FMScout post regarding FM25 news articles

What we didn’t see coming was just how open Miles would be, dropping honest insights into why FM25 didn’t live up to SI’s usual standards. If you caught yesterday’s video, you’ll know the basics — but here on the blog I want to go deeper and break down the key takeaways from across all three articles.

Miles Jacobson, Sports Interactive’s long-serving studio director, gave Eurogamer a full hour of his time, and from the very start, he was refreshingly open. He admitted that the responsibility for delivering the game each year ultimately falls on him, and it’s clear from FM’s long history just how much pride he takes in keeping the series up to standard.

But let’s be frank, thanks to Miles’ honesty, we also know that not every recent feature on recent release has landed as intended. He stressed in the Development Updates that the key now is learning from those missteps and making sure FM25 builds on those lessons and is a generational leap forward.

From The Athletic, we now know the FM24 player base has grown to 19.2 million. Statistics from Netflix show that at least 10 million of those players came from mobile downloads. With growth like this, it’s no wonder the pressure and expectations from the fan base have skyrocketed.

In both articles, Miles admits that cancelling a game after 30 years of success must have been an extremely difficult decision. Some older fans, myself included, will recall that it’s been 20 years since the studio last faced such challenges. Even then, trust had been built with the community, and although many whilst disappointed with the outcome, supported the decision, there are fans who also feel let down and mislead.

This sense of pressure and responsibility comes through in all the articles. Miles openly acknowledged that Football Manager has been a big part of people’s lives and that he feels he owes fans an apology. Reflecting on FM25, he told Eurogamer:

“We put ourselves under a huge amount of pressure with FM25,” Jacobson says. “We were trying to do the impossible, trying to make the impossible possible, and there were times when we thought we could do it.”

Unfortunately, in trying to make the impossible possible, as Miles goes onto explain some areas ended up feeling unfinished or clunky, which ultimately led to the tough decision to cancel the release.

So what went wrong? Interestingly, the two interviews paint slightly different pictures. Miles told The Athletic that there were three core issues, that resulted in the revising our time lines Dev Update screenshots below something that the Eurogamer article does not touch upon.

One key factor Miles candidly admits was collective human error, during development, multiple people forgot to follow the proper bug-fixing processes. Although the Athletic article doesn’t dive into specifics, the QA team plays a vital role in spotting issues, and it’s clear from SI’s job postings that they use software like Jira to track and manage bugs.

Look, human error is always a risk in any job, whether it’s driving, filling out a form, or coding. But there should also be controls in place, through database systems or QA processes, to catch and manage bugs before they make it into the game. What's clear is that these bugs regardless of responsibility had badly affected User Interface and User Experience.

After all Miles says it didn't feel like Football Manager, it was clunky and crucially not fun. I don't know how much Miles plays on Console but a lot of the negative feedback is that its an extremely clunk UI and although core gameplay are functional it needs drastic improvement. So hopefully this is applied to Console as much as PC!

The second issue Miles touched on relates to legal challenges, though ongoing cases can’t be speculated on or disclosed. While researching why FM was banned in Brazil back in February 2025, the only concrete public information came from an article published on December 29th, 2024, which may shed some light on the legal issues Miles hinted at.

In November 2024, a motion was filed for repetitive lawsuit resolution, according to the São Paulo Court of Justice. The filing documented 1,055 lawsuits for damages over the improper use of player images in Football Manager. These cases involved former players from various Brazilian states and were submitted between January 2020 and March 2021 — all filed in the Central Court of São Paulo alone.

The minister also highlighted that the STJ’s legal definitions on the issues under debate could apply to many electronic games sold today and in the future, showing the scale and potential long-term impact of this repetitive legal theme

While the legal situation in Brazil highlights the unexpected challenges SI can face beyond development, Miles’ was unable to disclose the third unexpected challenge.

Both articles highlight the challenges of moving Football Manager into Unity. While Eurogamer focuses on the functionality side, The Athletic digs into pre-production issues. The team had underestimated the impact of moving from C++ to C#. What was initially estimated to take two weeks ended up taking some tasks nine months.

Even though the core game functionality was working, both sources highlight problems with the UI. Everything had to be rebuilt from scratch screens, graphics, and interface which contributed to the clunky experience players encountered.

Miles explained the situation to Eurogamer:

“On paper, everything looked great. The core game was there. The user experience, however, was the big problem. You couldn't find things in-game. It was clunky. Some of the screens were double-loading. The actual game itself was working — graphically, we weren't where we wanted to be. We didn't have the big leap that we wanted; it was a very good jump, but it wasn't a leap.”

Miles places no blame on Unity and still supports the decision taken to choose that engine, hoping that most of the grunt work and obstacles in FM25 will make it easier for future titles as they'll optimising/tweaking the game engine rather as the foundations have already been laid.

Both Articles cover the christmas break as the point of no return where Miles admitting that "I knew within an hour that we weren't going to be able to deliver." and the Athletic quoting that he couldn't find his youth squad which is a pretty damning indictment for a build.

For the Eurogamer Miles demonstrated a development version of the game. explaining that the messaging system replacing the old Inbox system of a narrow scrolling list on the left and the 'email' itself on the right. But just parsing the information there was difficult. Most English-speaking humans want to read from left to right, but often the key information would be in the middle pane. The right-hand one would feel redundant, and the left a less-clear version of what the old email list could've done anyway.

So the attempt at replicating modern technology lead to a poorer User Experience with a single navigation bar along the top right, Jacobson explains, which had buttons for the "portal, squad, recruitment, match day, club, and career". The tile and Cards system meant that you just couldn't find information. Playtesters, including FM's developers and Jacobson himself, couldn't find things - "if you can't find something in-game, you made a mistake,"

I'd argue there have been issues across many versions of FM where the onboarding process and tutorials almost desert new players or are not as intuitive to help guide experience players make the most of new features.

They invited consumers in and said the scores weren't bad but the problem is asking people to come in and rate a game who are clearly fans and wouldn't necessarily be neutral to the process when coming to the office etc. were they really 7s or was it being polite if Miles thought it was that bad himself UI wise.

Both Articles cover on the cancellation news and while I was spot on with my video back a week earlier to the cancellation news, our video below

Eurogamer covered the cancellation in detail:

“There are a lot of things that have to happen,” Jacobson explains when you cancel a game like Football Manager, one that’s annualised, loaded with licenses and agreements, and even has a Japanese stock market to consider. That conversation, for example, happened right at the start of January, but the public announcement wasn’t made until the following month.

Japanese stock market rules meant the news had to go out at 2 a.m. UK time, “which was then followed by people saying that we were trying to bury it,” Jacobson recalls. On top of that, he had to record a video addressed to “everyone at Sega,” explaining why he had decided to cancel the game. “Which was not an easy video to do,” he admits.

When speaking to The Athletic about the silence after the cancellation, Miles explained that they didn’t want to make promises before having something concrete to share. Or, as he put it bluntly, they needed to shut the F*** up, “as people will turn breadcrumbs into loaves of bread.” (Not sure if that was aimed at me — but I do like to bake!)

We'll cover more of whats coming in FM26 when we start getting more feature updates but thanks for reading the blog