Sports Interactive, the developers behind the football/soccer management simulator series Football Manager, has announced that Football Manager 2021 will be delayed. The blog entry announcing the delay cites the COVID-19 pandemic as the big reason behind this delay.
On the game's official website, studio director Miles Jacobson posted a blog entry talking about how the studio has been handling the pandemic. Despite the pandemic's harsh impact on many industries, Sports Interactive has been able to stay financially stable, make Football Manager 2020 briefly free-to-play back in March, bring on new employees, and continue development on future titles. However, Miles remarks that it's still easier to make games "when the bulk of the team are working in close physical proximity." It also doesn't help that the real-life world of football that they're trying to simulate is extremely up in the air. It's certainly not easy to create an accurate simulation of the world of football/soccer when there's so much that's uncertain.
For those curious about the studio's upcoming games, the major takeaway from Miles' blog post is that Football Manager 2021 will be releasing later this year, but it'll be released later than the team expected. Given that the 2020 installment released on Steam on November 18th last year, this means that the 2021 installment should at most be released slightly over a year since the last version. Despite the pandemic, Miles says that the new game will feature "exceptionally strong feature sets… albeit different to those we thought we’d settled on back in January when I completed my ‘dream feature set’." Miles also hinted that Football Manager 2021 will be on more platforms and storefronts than previous versions, but the team isn't one to talk about their plans until they're almost certain of them.
Football Manager 2021 is expected to release sometime later this year for PC.