Women’s soccer joins Football Manager

Six years after the FIFA EA Sports series, it’s the Football Manager’s turn to welcome women’s football.

A complete sport in one game

If Sports Interactive wants to be optimisticAnd However, you will have to patiently endure your problems before taking over the leadership of a women’s team within Football Manager. In fact, in a long blog post, the game team explained that the challenge is huge.

“We have no intention of offering an independent female version of FM. Women’s soccer will join FM… A sport, a game, and therefore players will be able to move as they like from a team of men to a team of women, and vice versa. Women’s soccer will be an integral part of the interactive world of each of your saves. This world will be bigger and more diverse‘, explains Miles Jacobson, head of the studio.

This is good news that is technically detailed to explain why it is not easy to add women’s teams to the game. In particular, because It would be necessary to create a complete database of women’s football, considering that the men’s database took 28 years of work. In addition to examining every feature of the game and determining exactly how to evaluate this data (the effect of player size, for example).

Rethink the movements

Then in terms of motion capture, a woman doesn’t move like a man. Thus, adding women’s football would require re-recording everything in the studio with female players.

“We have thousands of motion capture animations for our players, but when you apply them to the female players… well… they move a bit like a cowboy. The proportions vary as is the bone structure…‘, explains Miles Jacobson.We have no choice but to take over the whole thing and create new data. And I’m not talking about two or three days of motion capture in the studio… It takes months to clean and perfect the data generated in each session., so they integrate well with the game engine.“

Finally, another point the studio raised: Differences in salary, transfer system, should the impact of the menstrual cycle be applied to training and injuries in play, and what do we do in case of pregnancy? Lots of related questions that will determine the future of the game.

“It will take years to integrate women’s football into FM”

Obviously, all of this takes time and Mile Jacobson admits: Adding women’s soccer will be expensive, but above all it will take a lot of time.

“At this point, we don’t know exactly how long it will take, It is impossible to say which FM version will see the arrival of women’s football, but we think our goal is to get there as quickly as possible, while ensuring all the functionality you’d expect from new releases, while adding resources to the existing team.”

Players can at least rest assured knowing that steps are already in place for the future of the franchise.