Why it took 20 years to start making a true Football Manager sequel

gamesindustry.biz:

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

Like most annual franchises, Football Manager is not built from the ground up every year. The game is iterated upon, with various improvements and additions keeping the game fresh while still holding true to everything Sports Interactive has built before.

This, however, is about to change.

While Football Manager 2024 – which is expected to release this November – will be another annual iteration, it will be the last of its kind, with the developer recently announcing it will overhaul everything and even switch engine for next year's Football Manager 2025 – a title that studio director Miles Jacobson describes as "the first true sequel" in the series.

"This is a real opportunity for us to look at every area of the game, and go, 'Would we do it the same way if we were starting again?'," he tells GamesIndustry.biz. "This is a proper sequel that we're working on at the moment, in the background, while working on FM24, with full resources on both titles, because we've grown the studio so much to be able to work in this way. It's a new way of thinking for us as a studio."

The studio is still dedicated to work on FM24 and this year's iteration is actually being built up as the finale of Football Manager's first 20-year chapter. The studio boss tells us FM24 is designed to be the definitive Football Manager – at least in terms of the current format.

Jacobson even tells us the studio has been hinting at this reinvention for a while now. The branding and promotion for FM22 began introducing rips into the logo, which became more prominent in the following title, and taglines like 'Tear up the script' foreshadowed the changes that are to come.

"[That'