Football Manager is one of the most successful franchises in gaming history, racking up 14.5 million players worldwide for the current version. But there’s one awkward statistic: 99% of them are male.
One reason for that is because – until now – the game has been almost exclusively male. Yes, there are female staff members and even female managers such as U.S.A. head coach Emma Hayes in the game, but they can only take jobs at men’s clubs. Women’s soccer has been excluded from the game since its first incarnation in 1992, but that’s about to change.
A multi-million dollar investment by developer Sports Interactive means that the forthcoming Football Manager 25 will include women’s teams for the first time. More than 4,000 of them, in fact.
Here’s the story of how Football Manager became a women’s game too.
“I Was Wrong”
Miles Jacobson, studio director of Sports Interactive, the company behind the Football Manager series, admits it’s taken too long to get women into the game.
Speaking at an event at the company’s East London headquarters this week, he said he’d long argued that it “had to be commercially viable” before the company could consider the massive investment it would take to add women’s football to the game. “I was wrong,” he admitted.
Two separate conversations changed his mind: the first with his niece, who pointedly asked why there was no women’s football in the game he’s worked on for more than 30 years; the second with players from England’s highly successful Lionesses team, who told Jacobson that women’s football would never become commercially viable “unless people like you do something about it.”
His mind changed, he then had to have the money conversation with publisher Sega, telling them he was “going to be spending X millions of pounds on it,” the X being a number he’s not willing to disclose publicly.
So why is it so expensive to add women to the game?
The Long Road To Women’s Football
Jacobson first announced he wanted to bring women’s soccer to Football Manager in 2021, although even then he admitted “we’ve been working on women’s football in the background for some time now.”
Adding women’s football to a simulation as complex as Football Manager isn’t as simple as adding team and player names and twiddling with the graphics. There’s an enormous amount of work to do to ensure the game is as realistic as possible.
For starters, there’s the player database. Every player in the game has more than 300 data fields associated with them, covering everything from their physical metrics (height, acceleration, ability with each foot) to technical skills (dribbling, finishing, passing), to mental abilities (bravery, flair, “dirtiness”) and many more.
These attributes aren’t just generated at random. Over the years, Sports Interactive has built up a team of hundreds of scouts in countries all over the world to watch real-life football matches and report back on players’ abilities. Before the emergence of data-gathering firms in football, Football Manager’s database was actually used by professional football managers to research potential signings.
Yet, while there are now dozens of companies offering rich data on male footballers, that’s not the case for the women’s game. That meant, three years ago, Sports Interactive had to start building a women’s database from scratch.
“Data in women’s football is pretty pants,” said Tina Kerch, head of women’s football research at Sports Interactive, “pants” being an English colloquialism for not very good. Even in the places she could find data, “I was pretty skeptical” of its accuracy, Kerch added.
So, like the men’s version of the game, Kerch had to recruit a team of scouts to watch women’s football all over the world and gradually build a database. From a standing start in 2001, the database now holds the records of players from 4,016 women’s clubs playing in 524 competitions, with records on 3,617 non-playing members of staff. The company won’t (yet) reveal how many women’s players are in its database, but it’s safe to assume it’s in the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands.
Motion Capturing Female Footballers
The addition of women’s football isn’t the only big change coming with Football Manager 25. The game is moving to a new graphics engine, replacing its now tired-looking 3D match engine with one based on the Unity graphics engine.
Sports Interactive has yet to reveal any gameplay footage, even though the game is now only weeks from launch, but the company describes it as the “biggest technical and visual advancement for a generation.”
There are more than 7,000 motion capture animations in the new game, and all of those had to be done separately for male and female footballers. That meant hiring footballing twins Mollie and Rosie Kmita, the latter of which played for clubs including Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham Utd, to don the motion capture suits.
Rosie recalls how the pair would turn up every Friday at a warehouse in Brighton in the south of England, and work through a “list of deliverables” to ensure the motion capture captured every possible movement. They would be asked for “a hundred left-footed passes, a hundred right-footed passes,” and even “getting a red card and pretending to be sent off.”
Goalkeeper Sophie Whitehouse, who currently plays for Charlton Athletic in the English Women’s Championship, was hired to capture goalkeeper movements. “We are trying to simulate the women’s sport as accurately as possible,” said Jacobson.
Feminine Language
It’s not only the way the game looks that’s had to be feminized, but the way it reads too. The game contains more than four million words and phrases, more than The Bible according to Jacobson, and that language had to be made gender appropriate. Microsoft helped Sports Interactive with that project, Jacobson revealed.
The labelling of teams has also been revisited. In England, for example, many of the top teams have both men’s and women’s teams, so they shall now be labelled in-game as (for example) Tottenham Hotspur men and Tottenham Hotspur women. The suffix won’t only be applied to the women, as it is in many branches of the media and beyond.
That decision might trigger some of the neanderthals on social media who are already claiming that the inclusion of women’s football will ruin the game, as might the decision to make Football Manager 25 “one game world, where you can move seamlessly between men’s and women’s football,” according to Jacobson.
However, for those who really can’t bear the thought of engaging with the women’s game, there will be an option to toggle off women’s football, in exactly the same way as there will be an option to block off the men’s game.
“We are determined to be a small part of the solution for equality and equity in women’s sport,” said Jacobson. Game on.
