Sawt Falasteen - 'Enhancing the game': Football Manager includes women's clubs

"Football Manager 26" reflects the fast-rising profile of women's football, with Euro 2025 and the last World Cup both drawing record crowds.

"It's been a long time coming," said Tina Keech, who led the creation from scratch of a vast metrics database that gives gamers behind-the-scenes control of 14 global women's leagues.

"Of course" some fans have made sexist complaints, she told AFP, but "the majority have been really positive".

"It's actually just enhancing the game and making it a good experience, and a different experience," Keech said.

Of the millions of Football Manager gamers, 96 percent are men, according to British developer Sports Interactive.

Keech hopes the decision will attract women to the video game while boosting ticket sales for real-life women's teams that punters have virtually managed on their gaming console or PC.

"Football Manager 26", which will maintain the usual staple of men's teams, comes out on November 4 after "Football Manager 25" was delayed and eventually cancelled over problems including the upgrade of technical specs.

A major competitor -- career mode in EA Sports FC -- introduced women's sides last year.

For its main on-pitch gameplay, EA Sports FC, previously called FIFA, has featured women football stars for a decade.

Back in 2015, EA Sports' then-executive Peter Moore said he was "so sad to see the misogynistic vitriol" about the move to include women, adding: "We are better than this."

- 'Little stick men' -

The first Football Manager video game was created in 1982 by Kevin Toms, with the title later adopted by Sports Interactive for its Championship Manager series.

"When I first did Football Manager... and I did the graphics, they were little stick men. But they could have been stick women," Toms told AFP.

In the 1980s women's football was "very much smaller" but "fundamentally, there's nothing in football that women really can't do", said Toms, who has revived his original video game, now called "Football Star Manager".

Sports Interactive announced plans for women's teams in 2021 and they had been set to debut in "Football Manager 25".

The year's delay meant Keech and her team had to stay on top of fast-moving developments in the women's game.

In July, Arsenal spent a then-record £1 million ($1.3 million) to sign Canadian forward Olivia Smith from Liverpool.

"A year ago we never thought we'd see a million pounds being spent on a (woman) player," Keech said.

- Interest 'higher than ever' -

Shorter contract lengths and certain injuries that affect women more often were among the differences Keech encountered when building the database of more than 36,000 women players.

Her international team of around 50 researchers, or scouts, is "massive" -- although "not massive compared to the men's", she said.

Football Manager developers also filmed new motion capture for women's players to better reflect their physical movements in the game's match scenes.

Sports Interactive and its Japanese parent company Sega declined to reveal how much they spent on bringing women's teams to Football Manager.

Critics have blamed women's teams for the new game's delay or say it is pointless to spend resources on teams that few fans will play.

Kevin Chapman, whose Football Manager YouTube channel has nearly 200,000 subscribers, says he expects those fans to deliberately leave the game bad reviews.

"Overall the reaction has been positive -- probably a 50/30/20 split between people in favour, people who don't care and people against it," Chapman said.

But his analytics show that interest in Football Manager is "higher than ever".

"And I think women's football is contributing to that," he said.

H.Darwish--SF-PST