I Have a Problem with Women’s Football in FM
There is a slightly awkward confession I need to make about women’s football in Football Manager. I haven’t played much of it. Which feels like a strange thing to admit after spending so much time talking about women’s football coming to FM26. I’ve wanted this for years. I was excited when it was announced, excited when we started seeing more of it and excited when the game finally arrived. I wasn’t just interested in the idea, either. I actually built a save around it.
I called it The Climb. The idea was simple enough. Start at the bottom of the women’s game, work my way upwards through leagues and countries, and see where the career could take me. I wanted to discover clubs and players rather than arrive with a list of names I already knew. I wanted promotions to feel earned, the next league to bring a new challenge and the journey towards the top to feel like something I had built.
For a while, that worked. I was excited by the idea, excited by the challenges and excited by the fact that I was finally playing a part of Football Manager that had never existed in quite this way before. Then, somewhere along the way, I stopped playing.
Not because The Climb had failed, and not because I suddenly decided women’s football in Football Manager wasn’t interesting. I just got distracted. Life got busy, work happened, different content happened, and the save gradually became one of those things I kept telling myself I would come back to.
I’ll play it this weekend.
I’ll get back into it next week.
I’ll just finish this other game first.
And now we’re at the end of the FM26 cycle, which has left me thinking about women’s football in Football Manager in a slightly different way.
When FM26 was first announced, the question was whether women’s football could actually work in Football Manager. Now we’ve had a full cycle to find out. We’ve played it, tested it, complained about it, discovered players we didn’t know, found leagues we hadn’t previously considered and worked out what works and what still feels like it needs more attention.
The question now isn’t whether women’s football belongs in FM, it clearly does. The question is what happens next, and perhaps more importantly, what would make someone like me want to keep playing?
There is a lot to like about the way FM26 introduced women’s football. After years of asking for it, we finally had the chance to manage women’s clubs, discover players we might never have come across otherwise and build saves around a part of the football world that had previously been missing.
And honestly, one of the best things about that is that women’s football makes Football Manager feel unfamiliar again. After playing the series for years, the men’s game can sometimes feel like returning to somewhere you’ve lived for a long time. You know the clubs, you know the players, you know which leagues are worth exploring and you probably know which wonderkids are going to be recommended before you’ve even opened the scouting screen.
You also know that if you ask Football Manager Reddit for a cheap striker, somebody will have given you five names before you’ve finished writing the post. It’s practically a tradition.
Women’s football takes some of that knowledge away from you, and that’s refreshing. You open the player search and suddenly you’re back to being a bit clueless.
And being clueless can be brilliant. You find a player you’ve never heard of, scout her because something catches your eye, and suddenly discover that she’s 18, affordable and exactly what your squad needs. You’re not signing the same wonderkid you’ve used three times already. You’re discovering someone. You’re learning the game as you play it.
That’s something I’ve enjoyed about the idea of women’s football in FM, even if I haven’t played enough of it to pretend I’ve got every answer. In fact, that might be part of the problem. I’ve spent so much time thinking about women’s football in Football Manager that I sometimes forget I’m supposed to actually play the game.
The real world is changing too – and growing. Women’s football isn’t standing still while Football Manager tries to catch up.
Not just in the vague way we hear every time the Lionesses win a major tournament and everyone suddenly remembers women’s football exists, but in ways you can actually see. More people are watching, more girls are playing, clubs are investing, leagues are changing, new teams are appearing and existing teams are becoming more professional.
The whole structure is still moving underneath our feet. That should make this a fascinating moment for Football Manager. We’re not recreating a finished footballing world. We’re trying to simulate a sport that is still deciding what it wants to become.
Women’s football in FM shouldn’t become men’s football with different names. The financial landscape is different, the transfer market is different, contracts can work differently and clubs are at different stages of professional development.
Those differences can make a save more interesting. If one club has more money than me, that’s a problem I can solve. If another club has better facilities, that’s something I can try to catch up with. If a rival gets a huge investment and suddenly starts signing players I can’t afford, that’s a new challenge.
That’s where I think The Climb comes back into the picture. The whole idea behind the save was that I wanted to climb through the women’s game and see where I ended up. I wanted to start small and build something. I wanted the next league to feel different from the one before it. I wanted to learn as I went.
But a climb only works if the landscape changes as you get higher. If every league feels like the same thing with better players, eventually you’re not really climbing anymore. You’re just moving through menus.
The best Football Manager saves aren’t just about winning. They’re about looking back and realising how much has changed because you were there.
That’s what makes a Football Manager save special. You don’t just move through time. You leave something behind. You remember the player who scored the promotion winner, the teenager who wasn’t supposed to be good enough but somehow became captain, the awful signing who somehow turned into a club legend and the season when everything somehow went right.
The trophies are important, obviously, but they’re not really why we remember our saves. We remember the stories.
Women’s football has an enormous number of stories waiting to happen, particularly because the real game is changing so quickly. That’s why I don’t think FM27 needs to simply give us more women’s leagues and call the job done.
Please give us more leagues, obviously. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Give me an obscure second division and I’ll immediately decide that I’ve found the perfect next save. But more isn’t always the same as deeper.
I’d rather see the leagues already in the game become more alive. Give clubs more identity. Make rivalries matter. Make investment matter. Make promotion matter. Let clubs rise and fall. Let new powers emerge. Let the world around my club make decisions without asking me for permission.
If I spend ten years building a small club, I want that club to feel different because I was there. Maybe the academy is better. Maybe the facilities have improved. Maybe we’re attracting players who would never have considered us when I arrived. Maybe we’ve developed a rivalry with a club that barely mattered when I started.
Maybe we’re the club everyone else is trying to knock off the top.
The database can’t stand still either, because women’s football moves quickly. Players move clubs. Young players emerge. The professional game develops.
There will always be a gap between reality and a database that has to be researched, checked and eventually locked in. That’s unavoidable.
The important thing is that the database keeps moving with the sport. The women’s database is a long-term project, and that makes sense. There isn’t really a finished version of women’s football to capture because the sport itself is still changing.
We’re watching the foundations being built in real time. That should be incredibly exciting for Football Manager. The game doesn’t have to predict exactly what women’s football will look like in 2036. It just needs to give us a world where change can happen.
If I start a save in 2026, I don’t need the game to tell me what the women’s game will look like in 2036. I want the game to let me find out.
Maybe London City becomes one of the biggest clubs in Europe. Maybe another independent club comes along and knocks them off the top. Maybe an established men’s club finally decides to put serious money into its women’s team and becomes a powerhouse. Maybe another club decides the opposite and withdraws.
And that brings me back to the uncomfortable part of all this. I haven’t played much women’s football in FM26. I’ve played The Climb, but I haven’t finished The Climb. There have been lots of periods where I haven’t really felt like playing Football Manager at all.
That’s normal. Football Manager is supposed to be something we play for fun, and sometimes the game that normally eats your evening is the last thing you want to open. But the fact that I’m still thinking about The Climb tells me something.
The idea hasn’t stopped being interesting. I still want to know what happens. I still want to climb. I still want to discover the players, the clubs and the leagues I don’t know. I still want to see what happen.
I just didn’t find enough reason to keep climbing the first time.
And that’s where FM27 can make the difference. I don’t want Sports Interactive to make me play women’s football. I don’t want a giant message telling me that women’s football is important and that I should try it. I don’t want the game to feel like homework.
I want to be tempted. I want to open the game and see a club that makes me think, I could do something here. I want to find a player and immediately start imagining what she could become. I want to see a league I’ve never managed in and feel curious enough to start a new save. I want the game to create a story that I don’t want to put down.
That’s what The Climb did at the beginning. The idea grabbed me. I wanted to see where it went. Somewhere along the way, that feeling faded.
And I think FM27 has an opportunity to bring it back.
Because the real-world women’s game is giving Football Manager an incredible opportunity right now. The sport is growing, but it’s not finished. There is investment, but there is still uncertainty. There are new clubs, but some old projects are disappearing.
There are bigger crowds, bigger players, bigger competitions and bigger ambitions, but there are still clubs trying to work out whether they can afford to keep going.
There is no single story. There are hundreds of them happening at once. That’s what makes women’s football so interesting right now, and that’s exactly what I’d like to see reflected in Football Manager.
Not a static women’s game sitting neatly alongside the men’s game, but a women’s game that grows, changes and sometimes gets things wrong. A women’s game where clubs can rise, fall, disappear and return.
A women’s game where the future genuinely feels uncertain.
Because that’s what football feels like when you’re actually living through it. And that’s what Football Manager should be able to capture.
FM26 opened the door. FM27 needs to give us a reason to keep walking through it.
FM26 was the first step. It gave us the players, clubs, leagues and foundations. It proved that women’s football could exist inside the same Football Manager world.
Now FM27 gets the harder job. It has to make that world worth living in. It has to make the climb worth taking.
And maybe that’s why I don’t really think women’s football has a problem in Football Manager. The problem is that I can see how much potential there is.
I can see the real-world game growing around us. I can see clubs investing. I can see new projects appearing. I can see the risks too. I can see how quickly a women’s team can be celebrated when things are going well and how quickly it can become expendable when the men’s side needs the money.
I can see all these stories happening in real life.
I want to see what happens when Football Manager lets me create my own.
That’s what I want from FM27. Not simply more women’s football. More life around it. More reasons to care about the club, more reasons to care about the players and more reasons to care about what happens next.
Because the best thing about a climb isn’t reaching the top. It’s looking up and wondering what’s around the next corner.
And maybe that’s why, despite everything, I still want to go back to The Climb.
Perhaps FM27 can give me a reason to start again. I’ll probably load it up, forget what half my players are called, discover I’ve somehow got six goalkeepers and immediately decide I need another central midfielder.
Then I’ll play one match.
Then another.
And maybe this time, I’ll keep climbing.
