Sports Interactive’s 10 Year Plan – FM Numbers Are Skyrocketing and Aren’t Slowing Down

The following comes from Eurogamer’s excellent new interview with Football Manager chief Miles Jacobson, where he lifted the lid on just how big the series has become – and how Sports Interactive are plotting its future.

If there’s one thing Football Manager fans love, it’s a plan. Whether that’s plotting out youth intakes five years in advance or building a spreadsheet for transfer budgets that would put Deloitte to shame, long-term thinking is in our DNA. And it turns out SI are no different.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Jacobson revealed that FM isn’t just winging it from year to year – the team has its own five-year roadmap, while publisher Sega is working off a ten-year plan for the series. Yes, ten years. In Football Manager terms, that’s basically the equivalent of building a dynasty save from League Two to Champions League glory.

This long-term vision is partly about safeguarding against the very subscription platforms that have made FM bigger than ever. Xbox Game Pass, Netflix, Apple Arcade, PS Plus – you name it, FM is on it. And those platforms have sent player numbers through the roof:

• 19 million players in total (up from just 2m in 2020).
• 7.5 million of them have sunk at least five hours in.
• 1.7 billion hours of FM24 played in total.
• 2 million people were still playing in June this year – nearly two years after FM24 launched, despite there being no FM25 to follow it up.

Jacobson says SI has “nine times as many players, two and a half times the revenue” compared to a few years ago, and insists subscription deals haven’t killed sales either: “We don’t see cannibalisation, which is an absolute key thing.”

How? By planning ahead. “We built a whole business model around it,” Jacobson explains, saying it took five years of experiments before they rolled out the full strategy. The idea is to keep hold of the players who stick around for longer than a quick trial session – the ones who rack up the hours and will still buy the game if subscription deals vanish.

That forward-thinking is what makes FM’s situation different to other studios who’ve been vocal about Game Pass being “unsustainable”. Jacobson’s take is more pragmatic: FM works on subscriptions because they prepared for it, and they’ve built in contingencies for the day when the deals dry up.

Of course, all this sits against the backdrop of an industry struggling with layoffs and spiralling budgets. Jacobson points out FM isn’t just competing with other games anymore – it’s competing with YouTube, Netflix, music, streamers, and basically anything else demanding your eyeballs. With thousands of new games launching each month, not everything will survive.

But FM looks better placed than most. Jacobson calls it a “no-lose situation” in most cases, thanks to that insurance of loyal long-term players and the sheer scale of its audience. FM24 is somehow bigger two years on than it was at launch, and FM26 is shaping up to be the most ambitious entry yet, it feels like the series is still in safe hands.

So while we all wait for FM26, at least we know the future of Football Manager is mapped out – not just for the next release, but potentially for the next decade.

You can read the full interview with Miles Jacobson over on Eurogamer.

 

Check out our predicted best new wonderkids in FM 26 article!

Also check out our best FM 26 saves to do, voted for by real FM players!

Don’t miss our Premier League predicted lineups with injury news, data and tactical insights every single Gameweek!