Women's teams added to Football Manager for the first time

The latest edition of the Football Manager series will see some massive changes to the game.

As usual, you'll become a manager and pick a team to try and lead to victory.

But FM26 will allow you to manage women's teams as well as men's for the first time.

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

If you've never played Football Manager before, you don't actually play the fooball games.

Instead you control everything about the club that the manager would be in charge of, like transfers, tactics and training.

The results of the games are all based on the decisions you make as manager.

Football Manager was first released in November 2004.

Every year since then - apart from last year - there has been a new version of the game released.

Last year's release was delayed because of the development of these new updates to the game.

The game has a huge database of information on hundreds of thousands of players around the world.

Part of what made this game tricky for developers, was finding all this information for the women's database, which now features more than 36,000 female players.

The team has been gathering these statistics since 2021.

Studio director of Sports Interactive Miles Jacobson said: "It was hard to find certain bits of information because although data is prevalent in men's football, it is not the same in the women's game, where it is often inaccurate or missing altogether.

"In the end, an army of people from the women's game helped us, who wanted us to ensure that women's football was properly represented."

As well as building a new stats database, Football Manager's makers also had to record motion capture for female players, using former professional players Rosie and Mollie Kmita to suit up and execute the moves

The game will also benefit from new graphics.

Players' movements in real life have been captured by VAR and motion capture technology to be turned into animations in the game.

The sequences for the female players were recorded user former pros who suited up and executed the moves to make sure the female players' movements were authentic in the 3D simulation of the game.

Do you play Football Manager? Are you looking forward to being able to manage women's teams as well as men's? Let us know in the comments below.