Football Manager boss Miles Jacobson admits the franchise was “part of the problem” with the stance towards women’s football and that it’s “crazy” the feature is only coming to the game this year.
Women’s football has seen a significant rise in recent years due to receiving more attention from the media and games. Football Manager 25, launching on Nov. 26, will allow women to take charge of a women’s side for the first time.
The addition has been a long time coming, but Football Manager is not the first to venture into this area. EA Sports made a big move of its own in EA FC 24 to bring women’s football into the Ultimate Team mode for the first time.
Arriving in Football Manager 25 is a monumental occasion for the millions of players worldwide, and Jacobson, speaking to Dot Esports, admitted it should have happened “way earlier” and explained how the stance was swayed.
“We looked at it the wrong way. It was people who work in women’s football who sat down with me and said ‘you’re looking at this wrong, you can’t look at whether it’s commercially viable now, you need to look at whether you can make it commercially viable for everyone in the future,'” Jacobson said.
“This was a long time ago and lots of others have come along now, doing stuff to help grow women’s football, breaking through that glass ceiling,” he added. “Now we’re going to be a part of that but we were part of the problem and we hold our hands up to that.”
Unfortunately, there has been hate directed towards the decision to include women’s football in the game for the first time, which provides further indication of the misogyny that is prevalent across social media. Jacobson has a very easy approach for anyone not interested in the feature.
“We’ve got people who are turning around and saying ‘I don’t want it.’ Ok, if you don’t, don’t play it, but there are loads of people who do, so respect their opinion as well. It’s a really important thing for us to be bringing into the game and it’s a lot of fun to play,” he said.
Delving into women’s football will give any experienced Football Manager player new challenges to overcome, but, at its root, the core game is the same—which makes sense as football is a universal language and doesn’t vary based on gender, race, or anything else.
“The financial side of things is different, the transfers are different, what happens on the pitch is different in some areas but it’s football. So no, the game feels the same,” Jacobson explained.
Further down the line in Football Manager’s future, there may be other differences in women’s football compared to the men’s game, though this depends on how the real world adapts and deals with significant issues.
Maternity leave across the board, rather than being different in select nations, is one of the topics that may come to the franchise in the future, along with any outcome on studies as to whether the menstrual cycle affects ACL injuries. But they are areas where “women’s football still can’t decide what they’re doing.”
Another major area exclusive to women’s football is not in Football Manager 25, as Jacobson confirmed pregnancy is absent. However, the team wants to “look at it in future versions.”.
