Thu, Oct 23, 2025 page6

• New ‘Football Manager’ game includes women’s clubs

  • AFP, TOKYO
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  Women’s leagues would feature in the new Football Manager video game, which is to be released next month, a first in the decades-long history of the popular series that simulates team tactics and transfer drama.

  Football Manager 26 reflects the fast-rising profile of women’s soccer, with UEFA Women’s Euro 2025 and the last FIFA Women’s World Cup drawing record crowds.

  “It’s been a long time coming,” said Tina Keech, who led the creation from scratch of a vast metrics database that gives gamers behind-the-scenes control of 14 global women’s leagues.

  

  Barcelona’s Aitana Bonmati dribbles during their UEFA Women’s Champions League match against Bayern Munich at Johan Cruyff Stadium in Barcelona, Spain, on Oct. 7.

  Photo: AFP

  “Of course” some fans have made sexist complaints, but “the majority have been really positive,” Keech said.

  “It’s actually just enhancing the game and making it a good experience, and a different experience,” she said.

  Of the millions of Football Manager gamers, 96 percent are men, British developer Sports Interactive said.

  Keech hopes the decision would attract women to the video game while boosting ticket sales for real-life women’s teams that punters have virtually managed on their gaming console or PC.

  Football Manager 26, which would maintain the usual staple of men’s teams, comes out on Nov. 4 after Football Manager 25 was delayed and eventually canceled over problems including the upgrade of technical specs.

  A major competitor — career mode in EA Sports FC — introduced women’s sides last year.

  For its main on-pitch gameplay, EA Sports FC, previously called FIFA, has featured women soccer stars for a decade.

  Back in 2015, then-EA Sports executive Peter Moore said he was “so sad to see the misogynistic vitriol” about the move to include women, adding that “we are better than this.”

  The first Football Manager video game was created in 1982 by Kevin Toms, with the title later adopted by Sports Interactive for its Championship Manager series.

  “When I first did Football Manager ... and I did the graphics, they were little stick men, but they could have been stick women,” Toms said.

  In the 1980s women’s soccer was “very much smaller,” but “fundamentally, there’s nothing in football that women really can’t do,” said Toms, who has revived his original video game, now called Football Star Manager.

  Sports Interactive announced plans for women’s teams in 2021, and they had been set to debut in Football Manager 25.

  The year’s delay meant Keech and her team had to stay on top of fast-moving developments in the women’s game.

  In July, Arsenal spent a then-record ￡1 million (US$1.3 million) to sign Canadian forward Olivia Smith from Liverpool.

  “A year ago we never thought we’d see a million pounds being spent on a [female] player,” Keech said.

  Shorter contract lengths and certain injuries that affect women more often were among the differences Keech encountered when building the database of more than 36,000 women players.

  Her international team of about 50 researchers, or scouts, is “massive” — although “not massive compared to the men’s,” she said.

  Football Manager developers also filmed new motion capture for women’s players to better reflect their physical movements in the game’s match scenes.

  Sports Interactive and its Japanese parent company, Sega, declined to reveal how much they spent on bringing women’s teams to Football Manager.

  Critics have blamed women’s teams for the new game’s delay or said it is pointless to spend resources on teams that few fans would play.

  Kevin Chapman, whose Football Manager YouTube channel has about 200,000 subscribers, said he expects those fans to deliberately leave the game bad reviews.

  “Overall the reaction has been positive — probably a 50/30/20 split between people in favor, people who don’t care and people against it [respectively],” Chapman said.

  However, his analytics show that interest in Football Manager is “higher than ever.”

  “And I think women’s football is contributing to that,” he said.
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