With no new Football Manager from Sega in over a year, the creator of the original game from the 80s is reviving it on Steam.
After several delays, it wasn’t too surprising to hear Sega had cancelled Football Manager 25. But this does mean fans are having to go an unusually long time without a new instalment, with still no guarantee of when the next game will be out.
Developer Sports Interactive has insisted it’s working on another Football Manager game, but there’s no word on whether it’ll be called Football Manager 26 or if it’ll even be out this year.
In the meantime, there is an alternative: a re-release of the original Football Manager. Not the 2005 game that kicked off Sega’s series, but the 1982 original that was first released on the obscure Video Genie home computer and then various other formats of the 8-bit era.
Football Manager was originally created by Kevin Toms (whose face always appeared on the box cover) and found great success on the ZX Spectrum, although versions of it were ported to almost every home computer format of the 8-bit and 16-bit era, including the PC.
Despite being entirely text only it was a huge commercial success, although the last entry, in 1992, was made without Toms’ involvement and the series faded from memory.
It was revived in 2005 by developer Sports Interactive, and publisher Sega, as a means of continuing the Championship Manager series – which had always been a spiritual successor to Football Manager – by another name, although Toms was never involved in the making of the games.
Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning.
Toms returned to the genre in 2016, with mobile game Football Star Manager, and now he’s teamed up with publisher Curveball Games to bring the game to PC.
You won’t need to wait long to play it either since it launches in just a couple of weeks on August 14, the same day as the start of the Premier League season.
Email [email protected], leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.
To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.
For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.
Comment now Comments 2025-07-29T11:08:44Z