Football Manager 26: Beloved Sports Game Series Finally Adds Women's Football After Two Decades

After last year's absence, Football Manager will release FM26 today with a new gameplay feature.

The popular football team management simulation game series added women's football for the first time in its 20-year existence.

British developer Sports Interactive included 14 playable women's leagues across 11 nations to this year's release.

Integration of the Women's Game

On the game's official website, Sports Interactive confirmed the addition of women's football to FM26, ensuring fans of an immersive experience when playing.

Much of the gameplay on the women's side is similar with playing men's teams. It's also just as real since they had former pros motion capture the players' movements.

A former player who motion captured for the game, Rosie Kmita, shared her insights with BBC, along with her excitement to see the game's community grow with this addition.

'Normalising women's football in the game is exciting and we'll see the repercussions of that,' Kmita said. 'I think we're about to engage a whole new audience and I'm excited to see how this community continues to grow.'

Her twin sister Mollie, who also played club football, joined her in the motion capture process.

The Challenges of Expansion

The series' new in-game expansion comes with the biggest database in women's football in video games.

Sports Interactive's Head of Women's Football research Tina Keech told BBC that it took four years of hard work to make the new feature as accurate as possible.

'This is the biggest database in women's football in video games. We've had to go out and do some real hard work to find this accurate data,' Keech shared.

It includes a massive list of 40,000 women's players across the 14 leagues players can choose from. Studio director Miles Jacobson also harped on the challenge of finding data on the women's side.

'It was hard to find certain bits of information because although data is prevalent in men's football, it is not the same in the women's game, where it is often inaccurate or missing altogether,' he told BBC.

Fortunately, they had a lot of help that included 40 club teams that they have a direct working relationship with.

Seamless Transition and Customisation

The developers also boast about giving its players the ability to customise their game world.

They have the option of managing a team in women's leagues, men's leagues, or both. Movement between managing a league for each gender will be seamless, with a note that loading leagues from the same country counts as two nations on players' save limit of 10.

Another new addition to the game is its revamped user interface (UI) for consoles, which now has fewer tiles on each screen for easier navigation.

Other Need-to-Know Details

According to the game's Steam page, it will be available to purchase at 5 p.m. in the UK and will be playable on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PC, iOS, and Android.

The game requires 7GB of storage space for PC, Mac, and Xbox users via Steam, Epic Games Store, and Microsoft Store, while it needs 6GB for Switch and PS5.