Football Manager has finally added women's teams after 20 years. I put the game to the test

The most recent edition of the Football Manager game was played by a mind-blowing 20 million people.

But last year a new game wasn't released, for the first time in its 20-year history.

That's due to significant delays as its studio, Sports Interactive, made massive changes to refresh the series.

Usually, minor tweaks and features are added in new versions.

But what's coming in Football Manager 26 - when it finally releases on 4 November - is closer to a complete rewrite of everything that came before.

Some of the new features are ambitious, to say the least.

It will be the first game ever to feature women's football, including around 40,000 players from 14 leagues.

I visited Sports Interactive, the studio behind Football Manager, to get my hands on the game

And the user interface - the system you click through to sign players, read news and get to the football - has been remade.

Essentially, it is no minor update.

"This isn't a continuation," series boss Miles Jacobson told me. "This is a new game - the start of the next 20 years."

He even admitted it wasn't perfect, and said fixes would be needed.

And let's be blunt - as the public beta test nears its end, there are a lot of people online who are frankly furious with many of these changes.

"The user interface sucks," reads one angry comment. "They ruined my favourite game," reads another.

"New leadership is needed," reads a third.

Speaking of the leadership, Jacobson accepted this game could impact his future at the studio.

Jacobson has overseen the growth of Football Manager from its humble beginnings to its position as one of the best-selling video game series in history

After last year's cancellation, he told me Football Manager 26 simply needed to be a hit.

"You live and die by your decisions," he said. "If it was the wrong decision then I'm not going to be here in a year's time."

So what is it - a bold new step for one of the best-selling gaming franchises in history, or a colossal misfire akin to Ange Postecoglou's 39-day stint in charge of Nottingham Forest?

Four years of sweat and tears

Fans of women's football will be relieved to know this is no half-measure.

I played through a few seasons as Liverpool in the Women's Super League and was pleasantly surprised by just how well-integrated women are into the game.

Tina Keech has led the studio's women's football research team since 2021

"It's been four years of sweat and tears," Sports Interactive's head of women's football research Tina Keech told me.

"This is the biggest database in women's football in video games. We've had to go out and do some real hard work to find this accurate data."

She explained getting the stats of individual players' careers isn't as simple as Googling it - back in the day, clubs weren't so diligent about keeping records.

The top goal scorers in my first season in the WSL - it will be interesting to see if Sanni Franssi can recreate her in-game form in real life

But Football Manager, of course, is not just a database.

On the pitch, it benefits from new graphics, based on work with women's footballers in the motion capture studio, and a perhaps unlikely source: VAR.

Players' movements in real life have been captured by the tech and turned into animations in the game.

Football Manager lets you imagine all sorts of fanciful scenarios - such as my club Liverpool actually winning a game

Women's football provides its own unique challenges to the series.

Like in the real world, budgets are much tighter even for the top teams, so you need to be more careful how you spend your money.

For example, I mindlessly appealed against a failed work permit application to sign an international player - an irrelevant sum to a top men's team - only to discover this had wiped out a solid chunk of my transfer budget.

It all felt like playing Football Manager on hard mode, which was a welcome challenge.

The new graphics are a significant upgrade. Left: Football Manager 2024. Right: Football Manager 26.

But for those of us looking for a way to make the game a bit easier, Keech gave us the inside track on the game's first ever female wonderkids - young footballers who haven't yet hit the big time but who have significant potential.

She told me about two players in particular who can be signed immediately and have the potential to become star players - as long as you have the money.

"Felicia Schröder, I think there were quite a few WSL [Women's Super League] clubs looking at her in the summer, she's out in Sweden, scoring goals for fun," Keech said. "And then Trinity Armstrong, who's out in the US and is supposed to be a really impressive centre-back."

Felicia Schröder already has three caps for Sweden and has scored 42 goals in 62 appearances for Swedish club BK Häcken

Tactical overhaul

It's the football matches themselves which have faced the biggest changes.

In previous versions, you didn't have much to do between watching the highlights. You could follow the text at the bottom of the screen, but most people just twiddled their thumbs and waited.

But that's all changed - now, you see a small visual representation of what's happening with dots on a screen, harking back to how the game looked in the 00s.

When not showing the highlights in the 3D engine, these little numbered dots show you what's happening - so you can see if your tactics are working

Visually, it's lots of fun, with new camera angles which better reflect how football plays out on the telly.

Another massive new feature - and I appreciate this one is really for the football nerds out there - is an overhaul of the tactics system.

Previously you would have one tactic and individual instructions for players. Now, you can set two different tactics at once - one for when your team has the ball, and one for when they don't.

These completely change the match experience for the better, and coupled with the new graphics, it's fair to say football has never been so much fun in Football Manager.

I'll even admit to clapping my hands and spinning in my chair with excitement when Fūka Nagano blasted in a piledriver from 35 yards - which led to a bunch of staff at the studio gathering around to watch the replay.

But for all the bits that work, there are problems too. The game sometimes felt unfinished.

I played a work-in-progress version of the game when I visited Sports Interactive in October, and since then, I've been playing a "beta" version. So it's possible some of these issues may be addressed by the time the game comes out.

The user interface has been the focus of dissent online, and not without good reason. When it works, it's great - but when you can't figure out how to do something, it's a chore.

Fans will say the old user interface had its problems, but we all knew how to use it - so why change it?

Gamers now navigate the world of Football Manager through tabs at the top of the screen

Then there were the bugs. At various times, information displayed incorrectly, menus didn't pop up when I clicked on them, and once a player even seemed to forget to wear their kit in a match and played in a tracksuit instead.

For a lot of people, these aren't deal-breakers, and some may even sound quite petty.

But I'm only listing a few of the problems I encountered. There's no real excuse for all of the problems this close to the game's full release.

Final whistle

After playing the game for quite a few hours, I was torn.

You have to reward the studio for the ambition. The matches are great, and women's football is an excellent addition.

But you can't manage national teams for men or women, only club teams, which seems ridiculous after England goalie Hannah Hampton's heroics this summer - though I've had it confirmed this will be added later as a free update.

And on that point, the studio confirmed to me there will be only one paid extra, an editor that lets you change player's stats. There will be no flood of micro-transactions or season passes, as has become common elsewhere in the gaming industry.

But there are glaring bugs. As someone who's been playing since 2004, it's clear to me the user interface needs many more months of work.

Ultimately, the thing fans will want to know is: can you still be hooked by the new version of a game so addictive it has reportedly been cited in multiple divorce cases?

As I enter my fourth season in charge of Liverpool, following a genuinely devastating 1-0 defeat in the Uefa Women's Champions League final to Arsenal courtesy of a late Alessia Russo goal, my answer probably becomes fairly obvious.

All the changes take some getting used to, but that desire for just "one more match" hasn't gone away.

Does that mean you should get it? I don't know. But I do think the early social media critics should remember one thing that's been a fact of football for decades.

Fans calling for the manager to be sacked should often be careful what they wish for.