Aside from trying out a demo of the game, we also got to ask a couple of questions to Football Manager 26 director Miles Jacobson at Tokyo Game Show 2025. As he’s also the studio director at Sports Interactive, we asked him questions regarding the addition of female teams into the game.
While Football Manager is two decades old now, it is only in the latest version that we’ll get female teams. According to Jacobson, this should’ve been added earlier, but it is finally here. Of course, there were some challenges in finally adding this to the game.
[The following is a partial transcript of the roundtable interview with Jacobson at TGS 2025.]
Adding the female teams must have been quite the arduous task. Can you walk us through how you went about accomplishing this feat?
Jacobson: Well, it’s five years’ worth of work. Firstly, I apologize that this has taken so long. It should have been there [in the game] earlier. There were commercial sensitivities around it [at one point]. And I got that wrong–because we have to break through the glass ceiling. Publications around the world are covering women’s football–it gets stuck. So we’re part of breaking through that glass ceiling.
It started by finding someone who’s a real expert on women’s football. And Tina Keech was that person. She applied for the role at the studio, and her knowledge is huge. She’s a [football] player herself. She then began recruiting people around the world to be able to be part of our research network.
A lot of the research networks on men’s football were also ‘Hey, I love women’s football as well, can I help with that?’ We built this network around to start building the data. So that was one stage of it.
The next stage was me and the design team spending a lot of time with people in the women’s football game—and I have to thank Emma Hayes, who is the manager of the United States [National team]. She taught me more about the menstrual cycle in an hour than from living with women for 53 years—and the effects that that has. I know we are not meant to talk about periods, right? Sorry, we are talking about periods, and we are happy doing it.
And the amount of help that we’ve had from people in the women’s game, whether that be players or managers or coaches—everyone’s been so encouraging. Because they want [it] the best they possibly can in-game, and so do we. So that’s why it’s taken so long.
We also wanted to make it seamless, so the men’s world and the women’s world are all merged together because that’s the reality of the world. You can move between men’s football and women’s football. We also know that there are some people who are fans just of women’s football, and there are some who are fans of just men’s football. So you can start with just men’s football, or you can start with just women’s football. Or you can merge the worlds together and have them.
The final two stages–we’re looking at one on the research side, making the decision of ‘Are we going to compare women’s football to men’s or not?’ And we made the decision that that actually wasn’t fair, because men tend to be stronger than women. Women tend to have better agility than men. So, do we make it so that all men who have 20 in Agility, ‘cause at most agile women are all of a sudden 16? No.
Do we have it that women run slightly slower than men because of how wide their bodies are? Do we have it that they can have 20 Pace? No. So we’re comparing men to men and women to women when it comes to their performance attributes. But when it comes to coaching, it’s exactly the same scale because women coaches are just as good as men coaches.
The final stage was really looking at the graphical side of things, and what some men don’t realize is that women’s body shapes are different from men’s. Women tend to have wider hips. They’re able to give birth, which no man is able to do, right? So the bodies are different, and if you take a bunch of male animations and put them onto a female body, they’d run like cowboys. It looks wrong. So we had to redo all of the motion capture animation, so we brought in a bunch of female footballers to come in and redo every animation we had in the game. Thousands of them.
Plus, being able to use volumetric data from real-life games as well. Of course, different haircuts, things like that, which our team had a lot of fun with, trying to make it all look right, trying to make it flow the right way.
Women’s goalkeepers tend to be shorter than male goalkeepers, but really, that’s not true, because if you put me in goal, and I’m 5 foot 6, you would expect strikers to be aiming the ball higher than they do if someone is 6 foot 4. So rather than looking at that as a women’s football and men’s football thing, we’ve just looked at this as a height thing. So people are trying to shoot the ball higher because they’re noticing there’s a small goalkeeper.
We’ve tried to look at every single detail; that’s why it’s taking us a long time. We’re delighted to have it coming this year. It would have come out at FM 25 if I hadn’t cancelled it ‘cause it wasn’t good enough [the game overall].
So delighted to be doing it now. So delighted to be having 11 leagues coming in on day 1, which is more than any sports game has. It’s more than most sports games have, men’s football as well, and fourteen different divisions in that. It’s only gonna grow from here. So we see it as a real positive thing to be in the game, and we built the team. We’re massively passionate about women’s football inside the creator team, but loads of people have become involved, and it’s been brilliant to see this coming together. And I hope we’re representing women’s football properly inside the game, because that’s our intention.
The inclusion of the female teams has been a milestone in the game. Can you share with us your goal or intent with the addition of this feature [like moving forward, are we looking to more leagues, more teams to work with, etc.]?
Jacobson: Yes, we started with 11 countries’ leagues. We have 53? Countries’ leagues for men’s football? We want there to be 53 pro leagues in women’s football, and I believe that the AAFC has a big part to play in this. And huge thanks to AAFC, by the way, because they have exclusive licenses with some of the women’s teams. And they turned around when “Hey, Football Manager, come along, they can have the licenses as well.” So they’ve been really, really helpful throughout this process. Our friends over there have been just so wonderful to work with.
So our dream is what should be reality, which is that men and women are equal. We’re all humans, right? [And there are brilliant men and brilliant women and there are assholes and there are women that are assholes]
We’ve made such huge strides over the last 50 years for equality, but we’re not there yet. I think we all want to be there, right? I’d love nothing more than to have an equal number of women’s leagues and men’s leagues inside the game, but it’s gonna need for the sport to become popular–it’s gonna need for it to become more commercial. It’s gonna need parents to start girls playing football. It’s gonna need for schools to have equality for playing whatever sport they want to. It’s going to need less pigeon-holing, and that’s from both sides. Why can’t boys do dance classes? People just need to choose what their passions are, and if we can be a tiny, tiny part of that—a tiny part of bringing equality to sport, then we’ve won.
So my ambitions are exactly the same as the ambitions that we have for men’s football in the game. Because it’s one game. It’s football. It’s one sport.
Football Manager 26 will launch on November 4, 2025, for PC, macOS, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and mobile (via Netflix). The game will also launch on Switch 2 in December.