The popular Football Manager game, whose new version will be released within a month, will feature the inclusion of several women’s championships as a big new feature.in a new demonstration of the growth that women’s football is experiencing.
“We have been working on this for a long time,” Tina Keech, responsible for creating the database for this new edition, told AFP.
This time, players will be able to control teams from 14 international leagues, including the powerful Women’s Super League (England), the NWSL (USA) and the UEFA Champions League.
Keech admitted that some Football Manager users had made sexist criticisms about this development, but “the majority had a positive attitude”.
According to the British programming company Sports Interactive, 96% of users of the game, which is in its 26th edition, are men.
With this new version, Keech hopes to attract more users in the same way that women’s football reaches more and more spectators, as was demonstrated in the last World Cup (2023) or the last Euro Cup (2025), in which attendance records were broken.
“It improves the game and makes it a great experience, a different experience”, argues Keech.
“Football Manager 26” will keep the regular men’s teams but add 14 women’s championships.
This game’s main competitor, EA Sports FC’s (formerly FIFA) career mode, is already a dynamic female team last year, although users have been able to play with female football stars in matches, the video game’s main mode, for more than 10 years.
In 2015, EA Sports CEO Peter Moore said he was “very saddened by the strong misogynistic criticism” received following the inclusion of women. “We deserve better,” he claimed.
– Adapt to evolution –
The first football club management game was created in 1982 by Kevin Toms. His game’s title, “Football Manager”, was later picked up by Sports Interactive.
“When I created Football Manager (…) and designed the graphics, they were very simple little men. They could have also been women,” Toms explained to AFP.
But in the 1980s, women’s football was “much less important”, despite “there is nothing in football that women can’t do”, he added.
More than four decades later, the Sports Interactive game has quickly adapted to the evolution of football.
For example, Arsenal spent one million pounds in July on signing Canadian striker Olivia Smith.
“A year ago, no one would have imagined that you would pay a million pounds for a player,” admits Keech.
– “More interest than ever” –
The game takes into account the specificities of women’s teams, such as shorter contracts and certain occasions that affect women more. Differences blocked by the team of around fifty people led by Keech when the database with more than 36,000 players was created.
The programmers also recorded players with the “motion capture” technique to represent the best way for athletes to move during matches.
Sports Interactive and its parent company, the Japanese Sega, did not disclose the investment made to integrate women’s football into the game.
Some at Football Manager consider that the delay in marketing the new version must be due to this new feature or criticizing that so many resources were dedicated to teams that completed with few followers.
For Kevin Chapman, who has a YouTube channel dedicated to this game and which has almost 200,000 subscribers, these criticisms are not representative.
“In general, the responses have been positive, with probably a 50-30-20 split between those who are developed, those who don’t care and those who are opposed,” he explains.
His channel statistics indicate that Football Manager has “more interest than ever” and Chapman is explicit that “women’s football contributes to this”.
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