‘We wanted to break down barriers’: women’s teams finally join Football Manager | OneFootball

Within minutes I am in the deep end as the Arsenal manager before the start of the 2025-26 season, sizing up a transfer budget that does not match my ambitions for the club. I am immediately at odds with the board when I launch a rogue bid to sign Aitana Bonmatí, which is immediately rejected.

I manage to recruit Alex Greenwood to shore things up in the wake of Leah Williamson’s injury and my late bid for Patri Guijarro, who wants to be part of my project, falls through at the last minute with the budget once again the problem. I demand answers from the board as to why they will not release more funds when the player-in-question wants to join, pointing out that our scouting report says she’s a necessary replacement for Lia Wälti.

Despite the off-pitch drama that has almost certainly put me in the line of fire within days of my unveiling, we win our opening game 5-0, a Chloe Kelly hat-trick and Emily Fox wonder-goal contributing, and Greenwood makes a solid first impression on her debut. All in all, Football Manager 26 is fun, and being able to play as the women’s team I grew up supporting and with the players I have in-depth knowledge of on the back of covering them week-in week-out is really cool, albeit a little bit of a busman’s holiday.

The introduction of women’s football into the Football Manager universe has been a long time coming, initially part of the 2025 launch of the game developed by Sports Interactive, before the entire edition was cancelled and focus turned instead to the 2026 edition, which was released last month.

Alongside EA Sports FC, Panini and Topps, Football Manager is playing its part in the women’s game being absorbed into football’s cultural space. For the companies involved this move is partly the right thing to do and partly a way to draw in new customers, as well as giving existing customers something new to engage with – on the basis they are open-minded in regards to there being ponytails on some of the players on the digital pitch.

“If someone who’s been playing this game for so long has not really had much of an interest in women’s football but just loves Football Manager, possibly even going as far back as the Championship Manager days, and wants to experience a new league or club they now have a new space to do that in,” says the Sports Interactive women’s football research coordinator, Chloe Woolaway. “If off the back of that they go on to watch a women’s football game or learn a few of the big names in women’s football that’s something that is really powerful. On the flipside of that, we’re introducing this world to the younger generation too.”

The introduction of women’s football into Football Manager, and into EAFC, also influences two major male dominated spaces: football and gaming. “We knew that women’s football was going to become as big as it can and that there is a space for it,” says Woolaway. “Gaming can be seen as this male-dominated industry. We wanted to break down those barriers and create a space for the women’s football community within it because it is growing community and a growing game. It’s really important that we create that space for people to express themselves and their love of football and gaming.”

The task of introducing women’s football into Football Manager was far from an easy one, in part due to a dearth of relevant information. As Woolaway puts it, the last few years have been “a bit of a madness”. The game ultimately launched with more than 30,000 female players with more than 300 fields having to be filled out for each and every one. Everything is in there, including: natural foot, dominant foot, current ability, potential ability, contract details, wage details and transfer fee.

“When you look at male players all it takes is a quick Google search. We quickly realised we would have to adapt the way that we research and recognised it was going to be a bit more time consuming and we would need to go to extra lengths to find information that should be readily available,” says Woolaway.

There was unique challenges to contend with, too. “The database has been moulded around the men’s game and we had to be solution focused to make it work for the women’s,” says Woolaway.

“Where do we fill in that a player’s now married and using their married name on their kit? Where do we show that a player wears a hijab when they play? What do we do with dual registrations? How do we reflect hair lengths? We also made the decision to remove player weights entirely, partly because when women are on their periods it can fluctuate so much that we felt it was not something that we should be putting in the game.”

For those involved it is now about building on a beast of a dataset. “There’s never going to be an end point,” says Woolaway. “Football is ever changing and there’s always going to be a new club, a new player, a new league, an error to fix or educated guess to tweak as the data becomes more accessible. There’s always room to progress and develop.”

“We were just going to create a computer game and I was the research girl helping to do that,” Woolaway adds. “Over time it came up in conversation more and more that we were and are creating one of the most extensive databases in the world for women’s football. I don’t think I quite realised that before and now that’s something I’m really proud of.”

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Header image: [Photograph: Sega]