The future of Football Manager

Sports Interactive boss Miles Jacobson has announced a range of major shifts coming to the Football Manager series, dubbed "one of the biggest changes in our history."

In an extensive developer blog, Jacobson apologised for the relative lack of new features in FM23, announced save game transfers coming in FM24, and the long-awaited arrival of women's football in FM25 - first announced back in 2021. Alongside all that is a shift from the studio's own in-house game development engine to the ubiquitous Unity.

All this makes this year's FM24 a "closing of this chapter in our history", Jacobson said, with a major revamp of everything from graphics, to UI, to underlying systems coming next year in FM25 - something Jacobson said will be, "for the first time in decades, a true sequel."

Alongside the big reveal, Jacobson sat down with Eurogamer for a deeper look at what all this means, including a discussion of what exactly happened with last year's FM23, and a little more detail on what to expect from the big changes in FM24 and FM25.

In his blog post, Jacobson calls FM23 the most-played game in the series' history at this stage of its life cycle, with 4.8 million players and growing (prior to having "embraced" platforms like Game Pass and Apple Arcade, this was typically closer to 2 million). But as Jacobson admits, FM23 had a less than stellar range of new features, such as the relatively underwhelming Squad Planner page, more reactive opposition managers, and some more detail on fanbases and what they think of your work.

Despite still being proud of the game's success, with Steam reviews still at 87 percent positive - "most studios would kill for that", Jacobson says - he's still disappointed with what the studio put out.

"I am a perfectionist, which is really frustrating because it means I've never been completely happy with anything we've released, because it's not perfect," he said. "But over the years, I've been able to have some lightbulb moments and realisations. I'm what could be described as a 'realistic perfectionist' - I am a perfectionist, but I know we're never gonna get there - so no, I'm never happy when there's a single person not happy with the games that we release, because we exist to make the best value for money games on the planet, and people work incredibly hard to be able to afford computer games.

"Last year wasn't the easiest, because it wasn't just dealing with that reaction. It wasn't just that I wasn't really happy with what we put out; I was disappointed that some of the features we were working on didn't make it. And some of them didn't have the effect that we hoped they would have during the design phase."

Jacobson says he's keen to take responsibility for any missteps. "If something goes wrong, it's on me," he states more than once during our conversation. But he's also keen to explain exactly how it went wrong with FM23. As the blog explains:

"We tried a few new processes last year, some of which worked, and some of which didn't. A few months before release we faced the reality of having to drop a few features that we'd wanted to deliver to ensure we were able to deliver a working game. While FM23 was released with some great new features and overall the game was great quality wise, it also contained some which just didn't hit the mark. Also, we weren't able to add enough smaller features, those that really add to the experience for players that go beyond the average 200-300 hours a year... for the most hardcore of players, there were less new features than normal."

Football Manager 2023 | Headline Feature Reveal | #FM23 Features

A major factor in this was the pandemic, the knock-on effects of which Jacobson feels have been somewhat underestimated. "I don't think that the majority of consumers, or journalists, understand how games are made. I don't think you do unless you're on the coalface actually making them," he said. The Sports Interactive team was affected by "the same issues that everyone had out there," but "also, people getting Covid can cause havoc in a schedule."

This was exacerbated by a shift to working in small groups the studio calls "feature pods" - one of those new processes mentioned in the blog - where a small group of staff from different departments work together over a short period on a specific feature. "This is something we brought in during the pandemic as we were growing as a studio," Jacobson explained. "It's all done on a sprint basis, so you've basically got a four to 14-day sprint, or 10-day sprint, to get everything done. [But if] one person gets sick, that sprint's broken... which then has knock-ons into the next pod. Because if that programmer was moving from that part from one pod to another pod for the next sprint, well which do you prioritise? That caused a lot of problems during that period, but that wasn't as much the case in the last year - although we still had people getting sick."

Even problems which cropped up at the design stage caused lost features because of the knock-on effect of getting something's scope estimated. "You're kind of waiting until the last part is designed before you can decide what you're going to be moving ahead with," Jacobson adds. Finally, this was all combined with the "growing pains" of expanding the team from around 110 people to close to 290 while changing to that new way of working.

"It's a huge jigsaw puzzle. As is the game itself - if you have one piece missing in a jigsaw puzzle, it makes the game feel less of a complete experience... But again, as I've said really clearly in the blog, and I'll say it again now, the final decisions on this stuff are made by me. So if anything went wrong, it's on me, it's not on anyone else."

Some of the features that didn't make it into FM23 will be in FM24, Jacobson confirmed, with the studio describing this year's game as "the most complete version of Football Manager to date," with a full feature lock for the game arriving earlier than usual and some "historic issues" getting a look at too. Some other features that didn't make it into FM23 will go "on the bookshelf", meanwhile. "When you're working on any iterative game, you always want to have some designs on a bookshelf you can pull out at times," Jacobson says. "Either when you're starting a new cycle, or if something looks like it's gonna slip, and then you've got something else there that you can actually do and complete in the time you have left."

The big new announcement for FM24 right now is the addition of save game transfers, a long-awaited feature that will let players continue their saves from FM23 in FM24 - and beyond that, into FM25 next year as well. It's something Jacobson says he's wanted to do for some time. "There is a large chunk of our audience who buy the game every two years," Jacobson explains. "They don't wanna lose their save. It's also important when you're on platforms like Apple Arcade and Game Pass, particularly with our situation regarding licensing - when our licences run out, we have to remove the game - for those people to be able to carry on."

The blog also alludes to a look at different "models" for Football Manager - moving away from annualised releases to a service model, for instance, but Jacobson said, despite the team investigating different options, that's unlikely to change for the foreseeable. "We've looked at all different models because the industry is changing the whole time, and there are some models our game suits well, and some it doesn't suit at all. Like, the PC version of FM going free to play with microtransactions doesn't work for the single-player experience. So we've looked at everything. But the plan at the moment is to remain as an annual iterative product... there are no plans at this time to change that, because we don't need to."

FM25 is where Jacobson is at his most bullish. Back in January 2020, the blog explains, Sports Interactive set up a small team named Project Dragonfly to focus on the longer-term future of Football Manager. The aim was for a big new vision to land with FM22 but Covid caused Dragonfly to slow down. The target shifted to FM23 then, eventually, all the way back to next year's FM25. Jacobson describes the idea behind Dragonfly as a fresh start, with the potential to throw out ideas originally decided decades ago.

"With the UI, it means we are able to look at everything from a very fresh perspective, by looking at the hundreds of screens we have inside the game and going, 'If we had our time again, would we set this screen out this way? Why would we have this information living here? Would we have rules in place that information can only live on one screen? Or could you have that information in multiple places? Should this be a screen in its own? Should it be a pop-up? If it is a pop-up, how do you then find it when you're not going there? How should you be doing actions down to things like how the people in football communicate now, because if you actually break down the interface, we have faxes, we have emails, we have phone messaging..."

"My dream is that once we release our new UI, the world of productivity tools will be looking at our UI and going, 'Why didn't we think of that?!'"

The biggest change is the shift to Unity, which will take over from the studio's own in-house engine that's been in use for decades. This will, the blog explains, lead to a "significantly better looking matchday experience," a possibility of "better quality graphics across all supported devices," and also a "vastly improved user interface that will dramatically improve how you navigate through screens and access all the information to you as a manager". There's also, at last, promise of "new technology for Newgens," the famously odd-looking, computer-generated young players who arrive in waves of U16s Academy intakes each year.

"We would have been helped by any of the major engines really, graphics-wise, because we haven't been able to keep pace with what they're able to do," Jacobson told me, adding that Unity had been willing to work with Sports Interactive specifically on the game's user interface. Will it be a complete rework? "It's not a small change," Jacobson teased.

"Whenever you make a change like this, it's actually pretty dangerous," he continued. "Changing the UI is the most dangerous change we can make - because people who have muscle memory of knowing exactly where to go won't have that anymore. It will be more modern, it will be slicker, and - this is a big statement, okay - my dream is that once we release our new UI, the world of productivity tools will be looking at our UI and going, 'Why didn't we think of that?!' Because FM is a giant productivity tool, right? You spend a lot of time in there."

Jacobson promised FM24 will see a "big jump" with animations focusing on ball physics and player locomotion before the "bulk" of improvements arrive in FM25, with things like upgraded models, stadiums, and surrounding scenes. "In simple terms, everything that moves will be far more true-to-life than ever before with FM25," he said. Even beyond that, it sounds like an almost ground-up approach to the game - with lessons from the series' 20-plus years carried through as well. As Jacobson put it, "with the game features as well as the UI, we are taking the stance of: if we had our time again, would we do it the same way?"

One change that might make a similarly revolutionary difference is licences, and there is a certain global football organisation that's found itself without a developer recently. FIFA, as you've probably heard, will no longer partner with EA Sports for EA's yearly football franchise, with the developer renaming that series EA Sports FC. Has Sports Interactive had any conversations with FIFA about that freshly available licence?

"So if we had had conversations with them, I wouldn't be able to talk about them," Jacobson said. "But we're not in the business of making action games," he explained - with "action games" here referring to the controllable action of games like EA's FIFA and Konami's Pro Evolution or eFootball. "That doesn't mean that we won't, or couldn't be in the future," Jacobson continued, "but if you look at FM and you look at our match engine, we are a simulation of football, we're not an arcade version of football. So I can't imagine people wanting to sit there and play in 90 minute matches, which they would need to do in our engine - whereas in some of the other football titles, if you play the 90 minute match, imagine what the scoreline's gonna be right? So our engine in Football Manager is just not suited to be an action game."

On the topic of licences, FM25 will at last bring women's football to the game. The blog alludes to some "legal issues" here which Jacobson couldn't expand on, but there's been more to it than that. "There's a lot of licensing work that needs to be done, is what I can say, and it's not always possible to do."

"We thought we'd worked out a lot of the hurdles we're going to have to face, but as we moved forward in development, we've realised there are other hurdles there as well. When I did the original blog, I might have spoken about how we're not looking to just slap ponytails on and say, 'Hey, this is women's football', we're trying to do it properly. And some of the things we didn't necessarily realise were as deeply different were the financial systems, the contract systems. There's a lot more work that we need to do under the hood.

"And there's also been a hell of a lot of work that needs to be done to ensure we can have men's and women's football in the same world, rather than them being a separated world. We want people to be able to move seamlessly between managing a men's club and a women's club and back again. Or stay in women's, or stay in men's, whatever the consumer wants to do, they'll be able to do. Having all of those sitting in the same world,with different transfer systems, is an uber complicated technical hurdle to solve."

That said, it seems like it will eventually be solvable. "We're making good progress on all of this stuff - and there's been more progress in the last few weeks in some of the areas that I've talked about in the blog as well, which I'll update in the next blog." Jacobson hopes to make the developer updates more regular, but it's unlikely we'll see another one as big as this for some time.