Sports Interactive has confirmed the latest issue of the popular game Football Manager has been pushed back to March 2025.
The company had originally targeted a release date in early November but pushed it back to later in the month after citing a “challenging” development cycle.
After making that decision in September, the company released a fresh statement confirming the “tough decision” to further delay the release date of the game on Thursday.
Now fans of the game will have just two months of the active season to play the game ahead of the summer.
The statement read: “After careful consideration, Sports Interactive have made the tough decision to further delay the release of Football Manager 25.
“Following discussions with SEGA, our licensors and partners, we have agreed the best course of action is to delay the launch until March 2025. Specific platform release dates will follow once confirmed.
“In our last development update in September, we explained that we needed to push FM25’s original release back to give ourselves more time to deliver the best possible experience for this first installment in a new era of Football Manager.
“This additional time has not been sufficient to ensure the game quality and experience meets your expectations and our very high standards.
“In the previous blog we explained that it has been a difficult development cycle for the studio. Many things have been moving slower than we had predicted – despite everyone in the team working at an incredible pace to try and get everything done.
“Timelines were already tight and, as rightly pointed out by many of your recent comments, we were simply rushing too much and in danger of compromising our usual standards.
“This has put an enormous amount of pressure on everyone working across the studio, who are all passionately committed to delivering the best game possible.
“The bigger picture here is that we need this additional time to deliver a game that we can all be proud of.”
Sports Interactive also added anyone who wished to claim a refund on their original pre-order will be allowed to do so.
FM25 is due to be the first edition of the series to use a new Unity game engine, while women’s football will also be introduced into the game for the first time.