For the very first time, you get to be the boss and run a women’s team to the top in this new game. The last game, the 2024 one, had 19 million players! The makers of the game hope that having women’s teams will help them find great players that no one knew about before. I bet it will.
This Football Manager game started a long time ago in 1992. Now, it has info on over 36,000 female players and 5,000 staff! The new game lets you play in 14 leagues in 11 countries, across three continents. That is a lot of depth, right? The game feels so real.
Sports Interactive, the company making the game, already gives real football clubs their data on over 700,000 male players. They been using this data for scouting for more than ten years. Now, clubs can use this same great data to find female players. Sports Interactive started collecting this female player data back in 2021.
Miles Jacobson, the head man at the game company, said it was hard to add the women’s game. He said, “There were a lot of challenges around adding the women’s game to FM.” He really stressed that they had to start from zero with scouting for women. He knew they had to get women’s football experts to help them.
He kept going, saying, “We’ve had our scouting set-up for 30-plus years in men’s football but we had to start from scratch on the women’s side, and we wanted to ensure that there were women’s football experts involved.” He told us that a whole “army of people from the women’s game” helped them. This made sure the women’s football part was good and felt right.
Mr. Jacobson also said that finding data was different. He explained, “It was hard to find certain bits of information because although data is prevalent in men’s football, it is not the same in the women’s game, where it is often inaccurate or missing altogether.” He hopes the finished game will help women’s football in ways that are more than just fun.
The game prides itself on how real and true it is. They even filmed new movements just for FM26. This is so the 3D match shows how female players really move. Every player in the game has scores up to 20 for their skills. This includes how fast they run, how well they pass, and even how brave or calm they are.
A big choice had to be made during making the game, Jacobson said. “We had a big debate that went on for many months about how to deal with the differences between male and female players in the stats,” he told us.
They decided to compare women with women and men with men. This stops the female players from getting low scores unfairly. “The fastest woman in the world, as we know from world records, is slightly slower than the fastest man, but we thought it was unfair that the fastest woman in the game wouldn’t have a 20 rating for pace or acceleration,” Jacobson explained. “So we kept it separate.” Staff attributes are the same for everyone.
Two sisters who used to play football, Mollie and Rosie Kmita, helped with the new movements. Mollie thinks letting people manage women’s teams will get new gamers and teach current gamers about women’s football.
“Growing up, I would never have imagined playing Football Manager because it wasn’t a space for us,” Mollie Kmita remembered. She said it is exciting to see “normalising women’s football in the game.”
“For someone who’s never been interested in women’s football before and decides to manage a women’s team, the amount of information and knowledge they will learn about players, teams and leagues is exciting,” Kmita added, looking forward. “I think we’re about to engage a whole new audience and I’m excited to see how this community continues to grow.”
Putting women’s football in FM26 is not just a little new thing. It could change everything about how many people see the game and how much power it has. This might help women in sports get a fairer chance.
