FIFA Manager 14 will be the last game in the series, as confirmed by series founder Gerald Kohler in the game’s official blog.
Gerald essentially concedes that the game’s main rival, Football Manager, has trounced FIFA Manager and simply dominated the genre in the two countries it is most popular in, England and Germany. Aside from this, the game was also in a very small niche, and the market trending towards online and mobile games had isolated it further.
FIFA Manager also reached a crossroads where the decision had to be made if they were going to make a new engine for the game, with added online features. Unfortunately for fans of the franchise, after deliberation, EA decided to end the series.
EA has dipped their toes in the football manager genre with FIFA Soccer Manager in 1997, and the FA Premier League Football Manager series in the years prior to FIFA Manager. FIFA Manager’s origins lay with developer Ascaron, who found success with the Anstoss series prior to joining EA. They developed Fussball Manager 2002, removing frivolous aspects of the Anstoss games, to test early waters. The following year, the game was rebranded as Total Club Manager 2003, and available multiplatform on PC, Xbox, and Playstation 2. The series was retitled again in 2005 to FIFA Manager 06, and this time, made a PC exclusive. It stayed FIFA Manager for almost a decade, and now here we are.
We wish Gerald and the team at Bright Future well in their future endeavors and congratulate them for over a decade of football manager sims.
