Welcome to our Deep Dive on Match Motion in Soccer Manager 2025!
Match Motion is easily the biggest new feature coming to the Soccer Manager series in SM25. This new engine offers a complete overhaul of the matchday visuals, making your players look & move better on the pitch than ever before. Months of work has gone into implementing Match Motion into the Soccer Manager series and it has resulted in our best-looking game yet!
A New Engine
Match Motion is a completely new experience compared to our old match engine. So many of the visual elements have been painstakingly improved to bring the in-game visuals forward a generation. For us, the matchday experience in-game is one of the most important elements of the game. Seeing your players put your tactics to the test on the pitch is ultimately what the Soccer Manager series is all about, so we wanted to make sure that matches look as good as they possibly can.
New Models
A key part of the new matchday experience is the upgraded player models that have been brought into the Soccer Manager series.
The players on the pitch are the focus of all the action in the Soccer Manager series. With that in mind, we needed to make sure that the players themselves look as good as possible. We saw upgrading the player models as being just as important as the rest of the work on the engine, so we have completely redone the in-game models to bring their visuals up a notch.
A key challenge for us when making models is making them look the best that they possibly can whilst also preserving the performance of the game. As models get more detailed, they also take more resources to render, taking up valuable performance. We’ve struck a balance in Soccer Manager 2025, with the models looking better than ever whilst also making sure matches still run as you’d expect.
Lifelike Animations
The animation system in-game is where we spent most of our time for Match Motion. It’s one thing to have good-looking player models, but they also needed top class animations to go along with them. For Soccer Manager 2025, we spent countless hours rebuilding how animations work in-game and creating over 300 new ones to make sure your players move realistically on the pitch.
The new animations included in-game range from much-improved remakes of basic actions like jogging and simple passes, through to all-new skill moves and overhead kicks. The increased number of animations available in Match Motion means that the behind-the-scenes technical side of the engine now has more options to choose from when deciding what your players should do on the pitch.
As well as new animations themselves, the engine that powers the whole system has been overhauled. In previous iterations, the engine would see that a pass needed to be played and would then play one of the pass animations. In Match Motion, we have now included much more data about the context around those animations. Animations will now be selected to be appropriate for how the ball is moving, how your player is moving, the direction they’re going, and so many other variables, helping the engine pick the animation that makes the most sense for the situation that your players are in.
As well as improving the selection process for which animation to play, we’ve made a number of other refinements to the system. The ball will now always make contact with a player’s foot and behave more realistically. Animations will now fully play out, rather than sometimes jumping very quickly between two (for example, when a player gets the ball and plays a pass). In situations like crosses, your players will actually shape their bodies to get into the right position to play the correct move. There are so many of these other tweaks that, when combined with the expanded range of animations and the new models, make Match Motion look better than the engine in the previous instalments in the series.
Players on the pitch will now also interact with each other better when they come into contact with each other. When going for a 50/50 header, for example, they will actually collide with one another and respond appropriately, rather than the models clipping against each other. These improvements also apply to other situations, such as slide tackles and the like, where players are expected to make contact with each other. This contact is now realistically simulated by our new engine.
Quality of Life
A few quality of life changes and other minor improvements have also been made to the match engine in Match Motion. Whilst the overwhelming majority of our work was on the animations and the players, there have also been some changes to the underlying elements that actually calculate how the games play out.
We’ve tweaked the balance to make players dribble more often, rather than focusing primarily on their passing. Players will also take first-time actions more often, such as passes and shots, rather than always attempting to control the ball first before moving on. Interceptions have had a focus on improving both performance and accuracy. Being calculated roughly 80% faster than before and fixing several frustrating cases where players would allow the ball to roll past without making a challenge.
Challenges & The Next Steps
When fully overhauling a major component of the game, there are always challenges and hurdles to clear along the way, and Match Motion was no exception to that.
The biggest challenge that the team had to overcome whilst building Match Motion was making sure your players’ actions were realistically timed. Previously, the match engine would try to do too many actions in a short timespan. This could lead to some glitchy behaviour where players could attempt things like kicking the ball multiple times within a very short timespan. Now, with the new engine in place, we can space out these actions and remove any of them that would appear unrealistic before they happen.
Timing in general proved to be an issue in a few areas of the match engine. In the old engine, players could run during actions where they should be stood still. This was down to them arriving at their destination earlier than they needed to for the action they needed to take which would lead to them continuing to run. The Match Motion animation system now directly drives the player and dictates their exact motion path, allowing them to chain actions and movements together without requiring a break.
These are just a couple of the challenges that our match engine team encountered whilst working on Match Motion. Through months of work and testing, we’ve been able to find solutions for the vast majority of problems, but some work still remains. As can be expected from an update like this, there are still some issues to be ironed out. Data from our beta testing has been hugely valuable in helping us track down & fix some of the remaining issues with the engine, and we’re rolling it out to more players as we get closer to launch. Match Motion has been built to power our games for years to come, so whilst there may be some issues at the start, it will only go from strength to strength in future updates.
Conclusion
As you can tell, there’s been a lot of work put into Match Motion! Our focus for Soccer Manager this year was to make it the best looking & feeling iteration in the series, and Match Motion is a massive part of this. Whilst we’ve not added many headline features this year, like international management last year, we’ve instead spent that time working on making the game simply play better than ever before. We can’t wait for you to get Match Motion in your hands and see your tactics put into practice on the pitch like never before!
