Football Manager 2021 Has Been (Unsurprisingly) Delayed

With many major sporting events being delayed or canceled during the Coronavirus pandemic, it’s not exactly surprising that this has had more than a few consequential effects. If you were, however, looking forward to the next release in the highly-popular ‘Football Manager‘ series then you might need to brace yourself for a little, if entirely unsurprising, delay in its release.

Football Manager 2021 Delayed!

Following the release of an official blog post, Sports Interactive, the developer of the series, has confirmed that Football Manager 2021 will be delayed. While not citing specifically when it will be released, they are still keen to emphasize, however, that it will definitely come out before the end of this year!

“We’ve been very quiet about future plans throughout this period, but then I never like us to talk about our plans until everything is definitively settled. I know that frustrates some of our fans, but it’s a policy that’s worked well for us in the 25+ years we’ve been making games.

What I can confirm today is that, despite all the problems going on in the world, there will be new Football Manager games released later this year. They will be delivered a little later than we’d originally planned, but they’ll have exceptionally strong feature sets… albeit different to those we thought we’d settled on back in January when I completed my ‘dream feature set.”

What Do We Think?

The delay is entirely logical based on two pretty substantial facts. Firstly, that the COVID-19 has undoubtedly placed severe restrictions on Sports Interactive and specifically in having ‘bums on seats’ to design the game. Secondly, with the football season not yet even officially concluded in the UK, sticking to the original likely release date would see a lot of work required to ensure that the right players are at the right clubs and the right teams are in the correct leagues/competitions.

So, as we said earlier, while not exactly shocking, do not panic. You’ll get your annual dose of Football Manager as usual. It’s just going to come a little later than planned this year!

For more information on the Football Manager 2021 development, you can check out the full blog post via the link here!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!