Before the shock cancellation of FM25, a new edition of Football Manager had been released every year for nineteen years. Sports Interactive is confident this was the right decision, and the quality of FM26 will justify the extra time spent developing the upcoming instalment.
However, despite some of the negativity surrounding the series following the FM25 release-that-never-was, Football Manager has never been more popular, according to studio head Miles Jacobson in an interview with Eurogamer.
"It was five, six years ago we celebrated two million players for the first time," Jacobson says. "And then we really embraced the subscription platforms, and because I haven't been on social media, these numbers haven't been updated for a long time [...] When I last checked, we're at 19.09 million players. Of which 7.5 million have played more than five hours."
Football Manager 2024 is available on almost everything you could imagine: last-generation consoles, current-generation consoles, PC and mobile. In terms of subscription services, FM24 is on Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, Apple Arcade and Netflix.
According to Jacobson, the average playtime for FM24 is 118 hours, including all the players who only played for an hour...
