Women's football coming to Football Manager

Big news as womens football has been announced to be introduced to Football Manager in the near future. In a blog Miles Jacobsen confirmed that the team at SI headquarters have been busy setting up a full womens database in Football Manager, including new 3d Models. While SI have announced womens football will be included in a future version of the game it is unclear which version this will be. At this point it seems unlikely that the feature will be introduced in Football Manager 2022.

Grown in popularity

Over the past few years womens football has grown immensely. SI want to help grow the game even further and have taken a major step by announcing the new feature for future versions. Miles acknowledges that SI have been receiving a lot of requests for adding a womens database to Football Manager.

Building the database

One of the major tasks that lies ahead is building the database for the first release. The mens database has taken 28 years to build and there is still a lot of work to be done when adding players, teams and full and multiple leagues.

Attributes

One of the major challenges is how in-game attributes will be translated to the women's side of the database. Every single attribute needs to be examined and defined to match the new scale for women's football. These attributes also feed the match engine, which will affect the overall match engine.

3d Models

While there are already female models for backroom staff and managers, Miles insists that these are too basic to use for the players in the 3d match engine. The male models have thousands of animations and these can't applied to the female models.

We have thousands of ‘motion captured’ animations for our male footballers and when you apply many of these animations onto female bodies… well… they kind of move like cowboys - Miles Jacobsen

 Transfer system

The transfer system in Football Manager is one of the most discussed areas of the game. SI have been developing the transfer market for years but now have the challenge to include the women's transfer system, which is different to the men’s, as are the financial and wage structures.

Injuries and Pregnancy

At this moment the SI team are still asking themselves 'how detailed' they should go for the initial release. There is a lot of existing literature available about the impact of the menstrual cycle on training and injuries, but how do they incorporate this without it having a major effect on gameplay? And what about pregnancy? If they have pregnant players and staff in game, do theyneed different 3D models for the different stages?

No release date

The cost and implementation of this project is substantial. At this stage they are uncertain when the feature will be added to the game. However, that the plan is to make this happen as soon as they 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.