Female Soccer Clubs to be Included in Football Manager in 2024
Sports Interactive announced in 2021 its plans to include women’s soccer in the popular simulation game, Football Manager. Now, the company has provided more details on the timeline for this addition. In a recent blog post discussing the future of the franchise, Sports Interactive confirmed that women’s teams will be introduced in Football Manager 2025, the upcoming edition set to release next year.
The studio initially said it would take some time to bring women’s soccer to market because it wanted to offer the same depth as the men’s game. Football Manager has a huge database of tens of thousands of players, each with unique stats, bios, injury history and so on. In addition to this, SI had to take into account changes in attribute systems, gender considerations in translations and different league rules for women’s football.
“The facts are that we’ve made really good progress in many areas, including research, the match engine, and translation,” SI studio director Miles Jacobson wrote. “But there are other areas that haven’t made enough progress, many of which are legal issues. The women’s game deserves to be the best it can be when it launches.”
In addition to the addition of women’s teams, Football Manager 2025 brings a fundamental change to the series as SI moves to the Unity game engine. Jacobson says this “gives us a lot more power graphically in all formats, along with powerful interface tools.” There will be a completely new user interface and a “significantly better-looking matchday experience”, while animations will take a “big leap” forward. However, switching to Unity on a mobile device takes a little longer.
The project to revamp the technology behind Football Manager has been in the works for several years. The original goal was to renew the series with Football Manager 2022, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced SI to take a step back and focus on making sure it could release a new version every year.
Elsewhere, Jacobson admitted that while FM23 has reached more than 5 million players (by far the most in the series’ history since SI introduced the Apple Arcade and PS5 versions), some of its features weren’t exactly empty. Some of those who play the version every year may also have been disappointed because they have “less new features than normal,” a studio executive noted.
However, SI has expanded its team and is on track to roll out FM24’s new features faster than usual, leaving more time for polish and bug fixes. One of these updates is overdue: the ability to carry over your progress from FM23 and pick up where you left off while taking advantage of FM24’s updates. Although SI will be moving to a new game engine next year, the studio plans to allow players to take FM24 saves to FM25 as well.
“This is especially good for those who play through Game Pass and Apple Arcade, who by subscribing to those platforms would lose access to their careers shortly after a new game is released,” Jacobson wrote. “This has been inevitable up until now as our licenses have expired, requiring us to remove titles from the platforms when they expire. We are still working out the finer details with the platform holders, but the idea is that you can seamlessly move from FM23 to FM24 on these platforms and continue to record or start a new one.”
