Football Manager 2025 is cancelled and that'd be fine if my team wasn't shit

This was written before the news broke late last night that Football Manager 2025 has been cancelled. It’s been lightly edited to reflect that but the tone of the piece remains the same as originally intended.

For the time being, seasons are predictable. Come October, the leaves change to reds and browns, crisp up and fall. The winter breeze blows through, bringing much needed cooling to the tropics, and the countdown begins to the release of a new Football Manager. 2024 was different. The tides rose, the rainy season sprawled most of the latter half of the year, and football manager, for the first time in my memory, was delayed for months and until it was ultimately cancelled. The delay was due to an ambitious overhaul of the game in both its systems and its visuals in order to give the team adequate time to meet their goals without compromise. At some point development team Sports Interactive decided that for the welfare of their staff and to ensure a quality product, they will punt on Football Manager 2025 (FM25) skipping straight to Football Manager 2026 (FM26) in the fall of this year. FM26 will now be the first entry to feature women's divisions, with developer Sports Interactive committing to not simply making a skin of the men's game. That's all well and good and exciting, except the team I support is shit and I can't do anything about it.

FM is the only annual video game release I keep up with for one reason: escapism. No, it'd be better to call it “wallowism.” An annual Southampton save is a ritual. I fire up the latest version of Football Manager after a heartbreaking loss or an extended run of heartbreaking losses as a balm for my aching soul. It's an “I can fix him.” I create a save where I am the fresh-faced manager of the Southampton Football Club, a mid-tier organisation on the south coast of England. Each year, through my own tactical nous, and research on what tactical tendencies overwhelms the opponent AI, I propel Southampton far beyond any realistic expectations and into the top 4 positions of the 20 team English Premier League.

In 2023, the real Southampton FC played in the English Football League Championship, after relegation the year prior. In the English footballing pyramid, so named after the seemingly endless divisions that converge at the Premier League, placing at bottom or near the bottom of the table results in relegation — demotion to a lower tier. We won the playoffs at the end of the season to secure promotion back to the top division. Today we are the worst team in the league. We are historically bad. Southampton FC is not only on track for another relegation, but the worst points finish in Premier League history. Rooted at the bottom of the table, we’re ten eight(!!) points adrift of 17th. There are individual players on other teams that have more goals by themselves than all of Southampton [FC or possibly otherwise] put together. We have won one two(!!) game(s) all season. A woman won a competition guessing the score in our match with Brentford -- we lost 5-0. It is dire.

The most recent release of Football Manager, FM24, covers the 2023-2024 season with us in the English Second Division aka the Championship. The rosters are now outdated, but more importantly, we were good. In that 2023 season we comfortably finished in the play-offs spots and at times challenged for top 2, which would have guaranteed automatic promotion to the Premier League. We played incredible football, monopolising possession and picking apart teams that were often too terrified to step out against us. It's the reverse of our present dynamic; we were the big fish in a small pond, and now we're eaten alive each and every match-day. So there will never be an entry in the Football Manager franchise with our current roster. There will never be an entry that captures how shit we are in this current moment. So I can never fix them.

Sports, at every level, is about losing. Even fans of serial winners craft situations where they are the underdogs. They beef with sporting laws, they beef regular laws, or they just plainly lie that ‘everyone’ doubted them. To be a sports fan, and especially a fan of a bad team, is to embrace vulnerability. It is loving knowing you will be hurt. To paraphrase Ryan Hunn, founder and co-host of the Stadio podcast, watching football is trusting your happiness to eleven strangers who do not know you exist. You lose so when you win it's that much sweeter. It's the promise of a better life to come. It's religion.

Football Manager is not the only football video game for purchase. There is EAFC (the video game franchise formerly known as FIFA), the biggest sports video game franchise on the planet, but Electronic Arts' annual football title gives the player too much control. With enough time, or by nudging the difficulty sliders in your favour, any player can take a team of even carpenters and plumbers to the top of the football world. Infamously, and accurately, dubbed a spreadsheet game, Football Manager provides the player with even more fine-tuned control. Players perform nearly every aspect of a real manager's day-to-day life. Much of the time in FM is spent poring over digital players, staring at their stats and tendencies, setting them up in tactics to succeed, training them up to shore up weaknesses, and signing off on purchasing new players when your old boys have taken you as far as possible.

All that control stops the minute you're on the pitch playing an actual game of football. On match-days your manager is bound to the touchline, like, I imagine, watching your children go off to school. Helpless. You watch from an overhead view as PS2 era 3D models go through canned animations, or, if you are a real pervert, you watch coloured dots pass around a ball from anywhere between 10 minutes and 2 hours. From there it's just more menus. You can tweak a formation. There's an option to “shout” instructions at your team or to scream from the touchline to encourage or criticise one of your boys. Here's the thing, the fuckers sometimes flat-out ignore you. This can lead to moments of magic. A winger disregards your patiently crafted and very intricate passing patterns to take on 5 defenders, dribble past all of them, and then slots the ball into the bottom right corner beyond the opposing keeper. More often than not, your defender delivers a perfect pass to the opposing striker, as if he has money on the game, who then canons the ball into the bottom corner of your net.

Usually I Alt+F4 here. This is the ultimate comfort I afford myself, an ad-hoc redo. Football is cruel and unfair and the simulator captures that fully, but in the digital world, it can be better. Football can work for me. We can do over a drubbing until it's a respectable loss, a nervy draw, or an undeserved win. This is sacrilegious in hardcore FM circles, but I don't care. It's a game for them — maybe even a lifestyle — but for me, it's therapy, and right now I need it more than ever.