Upcoming version of Football Manager gets women’s football

Football Manager will get women’s football sometime in the next few years. It’s not a separate game; the female players are added to the main games. Female players will not yet be present at the release of Football Manager 2022.

The developer says it has been working on the addition of women’s football for “some time” behind the scenes. However, the addition is a ‘difficult’ task, as many parts of the game have to be modified. For example, the developer cannot simply replace male players with women, he says, because certain player characteristics must be given different scales.

Sports Interactive cites the example of player height, which is used for the engine to calculate shots on target. If the keeper is smaller, players’ shots are aimed higher. Because women are on average shorter than men, the height scale Football Manager now uses would not work for female players.

In addition, Sports Interactive wants to conduct motion capture sessions with female players, in order to make the animations right. These mocap sessions have been made more difficult by the corona pandemic, the developer says. Finally, the text of the game has to be adapted and women’s football works differently in, for example, the transfer market than in men’s football.

Adding women’s football to the game will cost millions, according to the developer, while the expected return will be small. Sports Interactive says that it is not adding women’s football for the money, but to help break the glass ceiling within women’s football. The developer tells Eurogamer that women’s football will not be included in the release of Football Manager 2022, but that it may be added with an update.