Sports Interactive announced that they are currently working to bring women’s football into the rich tapestry of spreadsheets, data, and genuine story that is the Football Manager series.
SI’s Miles Jacobson posted a blog post revealing the team’s commitment in bringing women’s football into Football Manager, which when it arrives, will be part of the mainline game- not a separate series- as it should.
“There’s no hiding that there’s currently a glass ceiling for women’s football and we want to do what we can to help smash through it,” the post reads. “We believe in equality for all and we want to be part of the solution. We want to be a part of the process that puts women’s football on an equal footing with the men’s game.”
The blog reveals how the act of integrating women’s football into Football Manager isn’t just a matter of adding new columns in a database. It’s more complicated than that.
For one, there’s the need in getting those data first. The current FM database was built over 28 years, so now the devs are working on not only collecting data of players, but also how the data is to be judged and then convert into the in-game attributes.
Then there’s also the need to implement the transfer system in women’s football, and should the simulation include how menstruation and pregnancy and their impacts.
But the blog post also shows there’s a lot of effort already done so far. Motion capture using professional female footballers, Rosie and Mollie Kmita, are currently in progress. Tina Keech, a qualified coach and previously head of research and analysis at Smartodds is now appointed as head of research for women’s football in effort to collect data for the women’s database. And the design team is already tackling how to implement aspects of women’s football already.
It’s still a long process, SI refers to it as a multi-year project. And with no dateline in sight so far, don’t expect it to arrive anytime soon. Good news is, it will come.
Source: Football Manager