Boss

It’s been a rough year for Football Manager. This time last summer, the ambitious FM25 was still a certainty, but while the development team at Sports Interactive remained optimistic – albeit to different degrees – soon came the first of two delays. FM25 would arrive two or three weeks later than its usual early November slot, the studio announced, with perhaps one of the first clues things weren’t going entirely smoothly.

It was fully unveiled later that month. Then, less than two weeks later, given a second, unprecedented delay to March 2025, a window that would’ve seen it launch three-quarters of the way through the football season. And in February this year it was cancelled altogether, the developer opting instead to divert all of its energy to this year’s Football Manager 26. It’s the first time in Sports Interactive’s 30-plus years of operating that they’ve failed to release an annual entry into the series.

“It’s my job to get the game out every year,” Miles Jacobson, Sports Interactive’s long-serving studio director tells me, during an hours-long conversation at the developer’s east London HQ earlier this summer. “We’ve done that for 30 years. But I failed to release something that was good enough.”

In a spacious corner office overlooking the still-sparkling development area of the 2012 Olympic Park in Hackney Wick, surrounded by framed football shirts, studio awards and a not-insignificant amount of desktop clutter, Jacobson sits facing outwards, looking over two big sofas towards an even bigger wall-mounted TV. Unlike many of the pristine, chaperoned office tours I’ve been on over the years, this one is very much the picture of a place in active use for work. And the work on FM26, which will, if all finally goes to plan, be released some time later this year, is still very much in progress.

Jacobson, after the roughest of development years, tells me he’s “feeling much, much better about things” this time around. “We’re making huge progress every day. We’re at a stage now where we are nearly feature complete.” And, crucially: “It feels like Football Manager.” For some time, with the old version of FM25 that would morph into this year’s FM26, that wasn’t the case.

Ultimately, FM25 was delayed and then cancelled for a simple reason. “It just wasn’t fun,” as Jacobson puts it. And it went through multiple delays before that cancellation for the same reason so many other games do the same as well. The goal was to make FM25 a genuine “leap” forward from the series entries before it. It was based on a new engine, in Unity. It had an all-new UI based on tiles, cards, and a central ‘portal’ that replaced the time-honoured Inbox. There was a huge visual revamp. And ultimately, doing all of that during a regular, annualised release schedule simply proved too much. “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.”

Image credit: Sports Interactive / Sega

A lot of FM25’s issues were picked up on, to some degree, as far back as late last summer. “I had an inkling even before we announced,” Jacobson says, referring to the official announcement of the game on 30th September last year, “but you can’t pull an announcement when it’s ready to go because you’ve got lots of things lined up – you’ve got spend lined up, you’ve got interviews lined up, you’ve got all this stuff.”

“On paper, everything looked great. The core game was there…”

And so, “we went out, we knew a few hours later – the decision was made literally one or two days afterwards that we were going to have to move the game.” 10 days later – after a delay to go through the due process of “stock market stuff”, with Sports Interactive owned by Sega, which is publicly traded on the Japanese stock market – the studio announced the big delay to the following March, and put out the roadmap for when certain aspects of the game would be revealed. Even then, the timeline was ambitious. “The shit was flying from all directions,” as Jacobson puts it. “It became really clear really quickly that we weren’t going to be able to hit the roadmap,” simply because footage of the game just wasn’t coming out well – “because the game wasn’t in a good enough state.”

The big realisation, that FM25 was simply never going to be ready in time, came over Christmas. The whole studio took a two-week break over the holidays, during which Jacobson traditionally boots up that year’s in-development version of the game to play around with it, and come back in the new year with a fresh perspective. “I knew within an hour that we weren’t going to be able to deliver.”

“On paper, everything looked great,” Jacobson says. “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,” he goes on. Part of the big, generational “leap” Jacobson is referring to here is down to the shift from the old, proprietary engine Sports Interactive has been using with Football Manager for decades to a new version of Unity, but again that just proved even more challenging than expected.

That said, the issues weren’t really technical. “It wasn’t crashing a lot, it just wasn’t fun. It felt clunky.” The game almost lost its famous – or infamous, if you ask the partners of one of FM’s many ludicrously dedicated players – “one more game” factor. It was “still there, but it was really painful… I’m gonna play the next match, but I’ve got to do all this stuff first, I’ve got to go through this and it’s going to be slow, and it’s going to be painful.” And then compounding all that were the issues with navigating through the new UI itself. “People were going: I can’t find the youth squad.”

Jacobson describes an awkward wait until the new year, opting to give the team a proper break rather than breaking the company’s rule on out-of-hours communication. On the first day back in the new year, when Jacobson was still meant to be off for the holidays, he came straight in and spoke to Matt Caroll, Sports Interactive’s COO, about the realisation the game wouldn’t make it for its twice-delayed release window of March 2025. Then, “within an hour,” he was talking to Jurgen Post, the recently-returned, long-running executive who’s now COO of Sega’s West Studios, telling him simply, “I can’t put this out.”

“We’ve got a fucking great game! We didn’t have a great game in December.”

Sega, Jacobson says, was surprisingly understanding. “To be fair, Jurgen was brilliant with it – he wanted to know the reasons why. There was no screaming, or anything like that.” The studio and Sega then had to “go away and work out how it was going to affect the financials,” before presenting it fully to Sega Japan, “who were also– they weren’t happy, but they were understanding,” Jacobson says. The teams together looked into a few different options. “What if we released in June? What if we released in May, does that give you enough time?” One of those was “knocked on the head by Sega,” Jacobson says, because “commercially it wouldn’t have worked.” Another didn’t give the studio enough time to fixed what needed fixing. And so they took the third option. “Bite the bullet and cancel, and go big or go home for this year” with FM26.

That process again was complicated. “There are a lot of things that have to happen,” as Jacobson puts it, when you cancel an annualised game like Football Manager, that has all kinds of licenses and agreements – and a Japanese stock market to contend with. That conversation happened right at the start of January, for instance, but wasn’t publicly announced until the next month. Japanese stock market rules also meant that the news had to go out at 2am UK time, “which was then followed by people saying that we were trying to bury it.” Jacobson also had to record a video of himself, addressed to “everyone at Sega,” explaining all the reasons why he had opted to cancel the game. “Which was not an easy video to do.”

“January wasn’t an easy month,” he says. “If there’s such a thing as crying emoji that actually cries out of the screen, that’s very much what that month was like.”

One significant upside amongst it all, however, was that the studio managed to avoid any layoffs related to the decision. But the financial impact was just as significant. “We lost a year of revenue,” Jacobson puts it bluntly. Then came all the discussions with the various partners and license owners, including the Premier League – freshly announced, ironically, as coming to the game for the first time with FM25 – “who were all very understanding – to different levels of understanding. Some of them were more ‘Hulk’ than others when it came to their reactions,” Jacobson smiles. “But again, totally understandable, the ones that weren’t happy. We took it on the chin.”

The Premier League, for their part, were “awesome to work with,” he adds. “It was getting messages of support from them, rather than anything else. And then it was, ‘we have to alert you to these clauses…'” he jokes. “Everyone who had to get paid, got paid. We didn’t shirk any of that stuff, and all of our relationships are intact with all of the licenses – and there will be more licenses for FM26… which we look forward to shouting very, very loudly about at some point.”

Image credit: Sports Interactive / Sega

Beyond all those external to the studio was the impact on Sports Interactive’s own staff. Jacobson describes the mood to me as “a mixture of relief and upset.” As well as “anger at some of the decisions that had been made… totally justifiable,” he adds. “Relief was the overarching thing, but there are some people at the studio whose confidence in the management team would absolutely have been knocked.” Notably, he adds, despite expecting some people to leave, the studio “probably had less turnover this year than normal” in terms of staff.

Some of those staff were also insistent that the studio had to at least do some kind of data update – a release of new stats, player ratings, results and other database elements to turn FM24 into a kind of makeshift FM25 to tide over fans – something the studio ultimately, and somewhat controversially, decided against. “Having now scoped the work that would be required, and despite a good initial response from many of our licensors, we cannot lift assets that we are using in FM25 and make them work in FM24 without recreating them in full,” a statement on that decision from Sports Interactive read, in late October last year.

“The same applies to the many competition rules, translations and database changes that cannot be back ported. The updated assets and data would both be required to obtain licensor approval – they cannot be separated.

“This is a substantial undertaking which would take critical resources away from delivering FM25 to the highest possible quality, which we simply cannot compromise on.”

As Jacobson puts it to me here, “there’s a bunch of different reasons” why they ultimately opted against it. “For a start with some leagues, we didn’t have the rights of the license for a data update,” he explains, “because contractually, it’s for a particular year. (Even just keeping FM24 available to buy, and available on the various subscription services it was on, took significant negotiation.)

Image credit: Sports Interactive / Sega

Then there were more technical reasons: the data that was set to be used for FM25, and now FM26, was formatted in a “completely different” way to the old games, effectively meaning the studio would have to do the work twice. “We worked out that it was around two months’ work for one of our most senior engineers – so the licensing team would have had to drop everything, switch to this, and probably three or four months of work for them.” On top of all that, he adds, there are “lots of unofficial updates out there – so we knew that people who wanted a new update would be serviced anyway. And the logistics behind it were a nightmare. So it wasn’t that we didn’t want to do it.”

Instead, the studio’s engineers continued largely uninterrupted, while others focused on post-mortems and handling the complicated messaging. “QA and design were tasked with: if we had our time again, what would we do differently? Comms were scrabbling, trying to put a new plan together… plus we’re working out: how the fuck do we tell the consumers what’s actually going on, and the timings for that?” The work in earnest, based on an “iteration plan” from those QA and design teams, started in March. July was the end date for that, and bug-fixing the final focus in the last few months up to launch.

Much of this – the realisation that the game wasn’t fun, the delays, the cancellation itself – was down to the ambitious, perhaps over-ambitious, decision to ditch the Inbox functionality that players have known for decades in exchange for a ‘portal’ that acted as your main in-game hub, and a WhatsApp equivalent for in-game communication.

The justification was sensible enough. As Jacobson put it to me last year, “it’s very rare that you see a football manager with a laptop” in the real game. “They’ve got their tablet, and they’ve got their phone, so we wanted to move into that more. The football world never really had email!”

Back in his office, Jabocson starts to explain the problems and how they were resolved, before ultimately conceding that showing is a lot easier than telling. He boots up his PC and switches on the giant television on the wall, then starts up a development version of the game. Previously, he explains, there were three windows of equal size, in vertical columns from left to right, replacing your 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.

Beyond that, the wider navigation around the game was also hugely streamlined. In FM25 there would’ve been a single navigation bar along the top right, Jacobson explains, which had buttons for the “portal, squad, recruitment, match day, club, and career”. Within each of those sections you’d find “tiles and cards”, the system briefly outlined with FM25’s initial unveiling last year.

Therein lay the problems. Playtesters, including FM’s developers and Jacobson himself, couldn’t find things – “if you can’t find something in-game, you made a mistake,” Jacobson says, of its UX design. “We brought some consumers in, and the consumer scores weren’t bad – we were getting sevens from the consumers. But I want nines.”

“Did we make the right decision? Yes. Did we do everything correctly after making that right decision? No.”

That iteration time, between March and July this year, has made what Jacobson feels is a significant difference. Some of the changes are remarkably simple – to the point where it’s a surprise they weren’t included in the first place. There are now back and forward buttons, for instance, as there are in FM24 and others before it, that were removed for FM25. There’s a secondary navigation bar below the main one, showing you all the sub-sections within those main ones without you having to click around to find things. There’s a configurable bookmarks section, where you can add instant navigation to specific screens of your choice, and a search bar. Which, again, feels like an astonishing omission in the first place. As one developer put it to Jacobson after trying out the improved UI, compared to the old FM25 one, FM26’s feels like “a warm hug.”

Jacobson, for his part, also feels significantly better about it. “I don’t believe we’re going to be disappointing people when we bring the game out. I don’t believe that we are going to lose the reputation that we’ve worked really hard to build up in the 30, 31 years I’ve been here.” Most importantly: “We’ve got a fucking great game! We didn’t have a great game in December, and genuinely that’s what it completely comes down to. We didn’t have a great game.”

Would Jacobson make the same decision again, in hindsight – to move to the new engine, tear up the usual Football Manager playbook and go for this big, ambitious “leap” that ultimately failed with FM25? “My answer is different on different days,” he replies.

“As a studio, we’ve always been really ambitious with what we’ve done, with what we’ve tried to do. We had reached the end of the line with the previous engine, so we needed to do something.” Ultimately, he says, it was “absolutely the right decision” to change engines when the studio did – in fact they “really didn’t have a choice but to change the technology, because we’d reached that point where we were breaking the technology that we had.”

“Did we make the right decision? Yes,” he continues. “Did we do everything correctly after making that right decision? No. Are there changes that I would have made to the decisions, if I had my time again? Yes. But I don’t lose sleep over those because you can’t manage them – and everything in life learns from the mistakes that they make.

“There might be some people in the studio who disagree with my answers on those, and think that we should have just carried on as-is. It wouldn’t have been right for anyone. If we had, we would have just stagnated. And stagnation is not good.”

Image credit: Sports Interactive / Sega

As we wrap things up, I try to tease out a little more detail on when FM26 might finally arrive. For the first time in an age, Football Manager fans who’ve planned holidays around the series’ near-clockwork release in early November (and ‘advanced access’ period of a few weeks immediately before it), don’t have a clear idea of what to expect. A “broadly similar time of year,” is what Jacobson is willing to give up on the record, and “there will definitely be a period where people can try the game, for sure, but whether it’s called a beta or it’s early access, we will make the decision down the line.”

For now, there’s still work to do. “We’ve got some bugs to fix, we’ve got some little bits of iteration to do,” he says. “Today’s problem is that we’ve got some issues with lighting in the match engine – so I’m not going to say it’s calm, because it never is – making games is really hard.”

The difference this time, however, compared to the somewhat frazzled Jacobson I spoke to in August last year, is that he’s saying all this with most of Sports Interactive’s toughest work behind them. “We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he smiles. “I’m saying that quite calmly.”

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