The big Football Manager interview: series boss Miles Jacobson on what went wrong with FM25, and what to expect from FM26

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.