'Football Manager 25' has been delayed with a key feature removed from the game.
Football Manager delayed
The iconic simulator was due to drop early November, but now developer Sports Interactive has confirmed this year's edition won't be available until later that month.
Studio manager Miles Jacobson said: "Firstly, we’ve had to shift the official announcement of FM25 to the end of September. The gameplay focus period will follow soon thereafter.
"Our target launch date has moved accordingly and is now scheduled for late November, rather than our usual early November slot.”
Jacobson also confirmed that international management "will not be a playable mode in FM25, FM25 Console or FM25 Touch".
He explained: "Coming off the back of a summer of tournament football and with this week even being an international break, we’ve looked really hard at international management in FM and determined that what we were planning to deliver wouldn’t reach our initial quality threshold.
"We also considered the available game data. Only 5.6% of all FM24 PC saves have used the mode, which we feel validates our view that we need to do much, much better with the experience. That number is even smaller on Console."
'FM25 Mobile' is on a "different development track and codebase" so will still get the feature, which will "return in a much more feature-rich way" to other versions in next year's game.
Jacobson said: "While difficult, these decisions are made for the good of the game and the majority of our players.
"We are determined to ensure that FM25, the first game in a new engine, is as good as it can be in the time we have.
"By pushing back FM25’s release date, we’ve given ourselves a few extra weeks of development time to try to deliver the best experience that we can for this first in the new era of Football Manager releases."