Football Manager Dev Investing 'Millions' To Add Women's Football

The team at Sports Interactive have announced a highly ambitious plan to introduce the women's game into Football Manager, which is said to cost "millions" and will require a total rewrite of certain aspects of the title.

In a blog post, CEO Miles Jacobson explained that women's football will be integrated into the main Football Manager experience, but first the team needs to build a "comprehensive global database", "examine every single in-game attribute", rewrite "100,000 strings" of text across 19 different languages, and much more.

That's not to mention the actual in-game match engine. The team at Sports Interactive will need to "recreate all of our existing motion captured animation data using female players", along with improving the in-game 3D models.

Jacobson says despite the huge financial cost, adding women's football is "the right thing to do":

"We also know that adding women’s football to Football Manager is going to cost millions and that the short-term return it delivers will be minimal. But that’s not the point.

There’s no hiding that there’s currently a glass ceiling for women’s football and we want to do what we can to help smash through it. We believe in equality for all and we want to be part of the solution. We want to be a part of the process that puts women’s football on an equal footing with the men’s game...

Longer term, as the women’s game grows in popularity, the financial rewards may come, but at the moment we’re embarking on this journey because we know it’s the right thing to do."

This addition is being described as a "multi-year project", so there's no set date for when women's football will be added into Football Manager. However, the "plan is to make this happen as soon as we possibly can, whilst ensuring that you are still getting all the features you’d expect from new versions of FM by adding resources to the existing team."

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