The temptation is to approach women’s football in Football Manager 26 as an entirely different game. That’s like treating tea and coffee as different food groups because they come in different mugs. After all, the pitch is the same size, the transfer screen contains the same buttons, and your centre-back will still select the worst possible moment to discover that she has the first touch of a farmer wearing cloggs.

Seriously, the mechanics of the game are the same. The tactical principles remain familiar. Space still matters. Rest defence still matters. A well-timed overlap can still dismantle a compact block, while an unnecessarily adventurous full-back can still turn a routine home match into a ninety-minute exploration of regret. It is the same game.

Women’s football simply operates under different conditions. That distinction is what makes women’s football such an interesting addition to FM26. The difference is that you need to relearn the footballing landscape. The financial scale is smaller, the transfer market is less dependent on fees, contracts are shorter, and the established hierarchy does not neatly mirror the men’s game. Knowledge accumulated during twenty years of Football Manager suddenly becomes less useful. Instead of seeing it as a separate game, look at it as diving head-first into an unknown league you downloaded, like for example Cyprus, Morocco or Uzbekistan.

For many experienced players, that may be the real attraction. Women’s football makes Football Manager unfamiliar again.

Football without the financial cheat code

Money has gradually distorted the traditional Football Manager experience. Take over a reasonably wealthy club in one of Europe’s major men’s leagues and most problems can eventually be solved in the transfer market. Need a defensive midfielder? Search for one. Need a left-footed centre-back? Scout twenty and buy the best affordable option. Your highly rated academy prospect is developing too slowly? Spend £35 million on somebody else’s.

Even supposedly long-term rebuilding projects can become shopping exercises. Once promotion to the top tier has been secured and, ideally, qualification for Europe is in the bag, the men’s game produces sufficient revenue, and the transfer budget begins to do much of the managing for you.

Women’s football changes that equation. The budgets are smaller, but that does not merely mean that every transfer fee contains fewer zeroes. The entire market works differently. By default, the game has shorter contracts, fewer release clauses and a transfer market largely dominated by free agents. Club revenues and wage expenditure are at a far lower level than the men’s game. It appears SI has created a separate financial model for the women’s game rather than applying the men’s financial model at a reduced scale.

This makes squad planning less about purchasing power and more about timing. Finding talent remains important, but knowing when contracts expire becomes essential. A player who would command a substantial fee in the men’s game may become available for nothing. Conversely, one of your best players can enter the final year of her contract before you have built enough sporting or financial power to persuade her to stay.

Granted, my first gig in women’s football was an easy one, as I started at PSG, but the club that is notorious in men’s football for splashing the cash was haemorrhaging money, and I sure as hell couldn’t afford to splash the cash to get whoever I wanted at mad wages. I got rid of some of the ageing stars for next-to-nothing and found that I freed up enough wages to break even, not sign replacements. Most reinforcements came either from the youth ranks or were players whose contracts expired at the end of the season.

This new dynamic with money changes your objective from looking for the best players (since money is not an issue) to looking for the best player who is available, interested and affordable within a much less forgiving wage structure. That produces a more volatile ecosystem. Squads can improve quickly because good players move without transfer fees. They can disintegrate just as quickly for the same reason.

The market is growing rapidly. FIFA recorded 2,440 international transfers in women’s professional football during 2025, with spending on fees reaching a record $28.6 million. That was more than 80 per cent higher than in 2024. Yet the equivalent figure in the men’s professional game was $13.08 billion. Growth is undeniable, but the difference in scale remains enormous. In FM26, that gap should not be treated as missing content. It creates a different type of management challenge, not unlike LLM-savegames in obscure nations.

Development becomes a strategy rather than a slogan

Smaller budgets place greater emphasis on development. That sounds obvious, perhaps even slightly romantic. Give young players opportunities, improve them through coaching and build a team instead of buying one. Every club claims to believe in it. Most abandon the idea the moment a billionaire offers them a larger transfer budget.

In women’s football, development is more difficult to avoid. If you cannot replace every weakness externally, you need to improve what you already have. As I mentioned in the previous section, I more or less had to rely on my own academy and developing the youngsters at the club, because I couldn’t buy a star-studded squad on the financial means the club offered me.

Giving youngsters opportunities and actively retraining them to fit my tactical system became second nature. I’d done similar things in the men’s game, but this time I couldn’t take the easy way out with a cheeky signing if things weren’t going to plan. Realistically, I could afford to bring in perhaps one player from outside each season, so any arrival had to be exceptional or offer something my youngsters simply couldn’t. (Finding a towering centre-back in women’s football, for example, is about as common as a referee admitting they got one wrong.)

This strategy changes the value of your coaching staff, training facilities and pathway into the first team. A young player is not merely a future source of transfer income. She may be the only realistic way to upgrade a position without damaging the wage structure. I invested the limited means I had into my coaching staff and facilities, making sure I mapped out which players had the potential to break into the first team.

In that regard, giving a player minutes became an investment. If the choice was between a 25-year-old who appeared to have peaked and was unlikely to break into the starting eleven outside of injuries or suspensions, and an 18-year-old talent who was still rough around the edges but needed game time to develop, the decision became straightforward.

I backed the youngster, turning rotation into a substitute for recruitment. A cup tie against weaker opposition was no longer simply a chance to rest the first team; it became an opportunity to accelerate the development of the player who might need to replace my starting midfielder when her contract expired in June. Surprisingly enough, that happened often enough, especially when Barcelona, Real Madrid or any of the MLS-clubs came calling.

Players leaving like that is the biggest complication you’ll face. Developing talent doesn’t guarantee you’ll get to keep it. Loyalty may know no bounds, but it certainly knows a price.

In FM26, the women’s transfer market is defined by shorter contracts and, as a result, a steady stream of free transfers. That means your investment in player development will often benefit wealthier clubs, reducing you to little more than a glorified feeder team. You’ll provide the coaching, the minutes and the patience, only for a bigger club to swoop in and collect the finished product without paying a penny in transfer fees.

That makes contract management an extension of player development. Renewing a promising player’s deal six months too late can undo three seasons of careful work. I know from experience. Ambitious youngsters who weren’t getting the playing time they wanted often left when their contracts expired, chasing greener pastures just as they were becoming good enough to deserve a bigger role.

I found myself constantly balancing success on the pitch against player happiness, player development and the club’s financial reality. More minutes generally accelerated a player’s progress, but they also accelerated demands for improved contracts and higher wages; commitments we couldn’t always afford. Every breakthrough season became a race against the clock: could we benefit from a player’s development before someone else did?

The challenge is therefore to build a club that talented players do not immediately want to leave, without haemorhaging money at every turn. It’s like trying to keep your best chefs when the restaurant next door has a Michelin star and a bigger payroll.

The hierarchy needs to be learned again

Most experienced FM players begin a men’s save with an enormous quantity of subconscious knowledge. We know which leagues are wealthy. We recognise the traditional superclubs, fallen giants and productive academies. We know approximately where Ajax, Benfica, Dortmund and Brighton sit in the food chain. Even without scouting a player, we often recognise the name and have an idea of what she, or rather traditionally he, might do. It’s a bit like being able to hum the chorus without remembering the verses.

Women’s football removes much of that comfort of subconscious knowledge. The badges are sometimes familiar, but the hierarchy is different. Arsenal, Chelsea and Barcelona are financial powers in both games, but their relative positions are not identical to those of their men’s teams. Lyon and Wolfsburg carry a level of historical importance in women’s European football that may surprise players whose knowledge is primarily based on the men’s game. Portland Thorns, NJ/NY Gotham and Kansas City Current belong to a completely different American sporting structure. The MLS is still somewhat of a second-rate league in the eyes of many, but in women’s football, the NWSL (the female counterpart of the MLS) is one of the biggest leagues.

For me, this creates the feeling of managing in a foreign league for the first time. You recognise the sport but not all its reference points. A club name cannot always tell you whether you are looking at a superpower, a development club or an ambitious newcomer. A player released by a famous institution is not automatically superior to one developed by a less familiar club.

Admittedly, I could have recreated much of this experience by downloading a custom database and taking charge of a club in Uzbekistan, Albania or Venezuela. But I found myself enjoying Football Manager 26’s women’s game far more. The unfamiliarity wasn’t manufactured by obscurity; it came from entering a football ecosystem where my decades of accumulated Football Manager knowledge suddenly counted for much less. That made every successful signing, tactical tweak and academy graduate feel like a genuine discovery. It was like switching from Google Maps back to a paper map. Slower, perhaps, but every route you discovered felt like your own.

In a way, I started challenging myself again. Scouting regained its original purpose. Rather than asking my recruitment department to confirm what I already knew from watching the Champions League or browsing football websites, I genuinely needed them to teach me about the world. Every scout report became an opportunity to discover a player, a club or even an entire footballing ecosystem I knew almost nothing about. It was like being fluent in Spanish and unexpectedly landing in Portugal; you recognise the shape of things, but not enough to fake it.

For me, as a veteran Football Manager player, that’s incredibly valuable. As my football knowledge expanded over the years, the game inevitably became easier. I knew where the bargains were, which academies consistently produced talent and which clubs could be relied upon to develop wonderkids. Eventually, I’d won everything there was to win. New saves often began with a roadmap already sketched out in my head, and I found myself playing almost on autopilot.

Women’s football strips that certainty away. It brings back the fog of war, forcing me outside my comfort zone and making me rely on my scouts rather than my memory. More importantly, it restores something I hadn’t realised I’d been missing: the thrill of genuine discovery. Every promising youngster, every hidden gem and every unfamiliar club feels earned because I’m finding them for the first time, not remembering them from the last decade of football.

Different competitions produce different problems

The main limitation is that the universe still feels incomplete. FM26 launches with more than 36,000 women’s players, approximately 5,000 non-playing staff and 14 playable leagues across 11 countries. These include the WSL and WSL 2, the NWSL, Frauen-Bundesliga, Serie A Femminile, Japan’s WE League, Damallsvenskan and Elitettan in Sweden, A-League Women, the Adran Premier in Wales, the French top flight and Spain’s top two divisions. The UEFA Women’s Champions League is also fully licensed. By any reasonable measure, that’s an impressive starting point. Yet it still feels like the opening chapter rather than the complete story.

There are still gaps in the footballing landscape. Several notable leagues and lower divisions remain absent, limiting the scope for certain journeyman careers and creating thinner player-development pathways in parts of the database. You can occasionally sense where the simulation runs out of road.

SI has been open about why. Unlike the men’s database, which has benefited from more than three decades of continuous research and refinement, the women’s game has been built almost entirely from scratch. FM26 is laying the foundations of a new footballing universe rather than simply extending an existing one, and that inevitably takes time.

Those limitations don’t mean the available leagues feel alike. Managing in the NWSL cannot be approached as a reskinned European save. Salary caps, drafts, roster rules and the absence of promotion and relegation fundamentally change how you build a squad and think about long-term planning. Sweden presents a very different challenge, placing greater emphasis on player development and recruitment.

Even so, there are moments when you wish the world stretched a little further. Just as the men’s game encourages you to hop between dozens of leagues over the course of a journeyman career, the women’s game occasionally reminds you that some destinations are still missing. That’s less a criticism than a reflection of where the mode is today. FM26 doesn’t yet offer the complete women’s football ecosystem, but it provides a remarkably solid foundation on which to build one.

Same language, different context

I’m part of a WhatsApp group of Dutch FM-players. One of the first questions they asked was how Football Manager handles attributes. The answer is refreshingly straightforward. Sports Interactive has retained the familiar 1-to-20 attribute scale. A female player with 20 Pace represents elite speed within the women’s game, just as a male player with 20 Pace represents elite speed within the men’s. The numbers are relative to the environment in which they’re used, and since men’s and women’s teams cannot play competitive matches against one another, there is no practical need for a shared absolute scale.

That was the right decision. Football Manager’s attribute system has always been a language rather than a scientific measurement. Its purpose is to describe how players compare with the opponents they’ll actually face, not to settle hypothetical debates about male and female athletes. Introducing a separate numerical system would only have made the women’s game harder to read without making it more realistic.

As a result, the game remains immediately recognisable. A midfielder with excellent Anticipation, Decisions and Positioning will still control the tempo of a match through intelligent movement. A rapid striker will still exploit space behind the defence. A technically gifted but physically limited playmaker will still benefit from teammates who compensate for her weaknesses. If you understand Football Manager, you already understand how to interpret the attributes.

That doesn’t mean Sports Interactive simply copied the men’s game and changed the player models. Where meaningful differences exist, they have been reflected in the simulation. Injury prevalence and recovery have been adjusted using women’s football data. Female footballers participated in dedicated motion-capture sessions, while new player models, hairstyles and kit options were created specifically for the women’s game.

Ultimately, that encapsulates FM26’s philosophy. The objective wasn’t to create a separate version of Football Manager with its own rules and language. It was to integrate women’s football into the same management framework while adapting the areas where the sport genuinely differs. The result feels familiar without feeling like a reskin.

The debate around inclusion misses the point

Much of the discussion surrounding women’s football in Football Manager has focused on whether it deserves to be there. Some questioned whether enough people would play it to justify the years of development. Others argued that Football Manager should aim to represent as much of the football world as possible.

Both arguments miss what I think is the most interesting point. Women’s football simply makes Football Manager better by challenging us as managers. By stripping away decades of accumulated player knowledge, it restores the importance of scouting. Smaller budgets make player development more valuable than recruitment. Shorter contracts turn squad building into a constant balancing act, while different league structures force you to rethink assumptions you’ve carried from hundreds of saves in the men’s game. Even the financial landscape feels different, allowing you to participate in the growth of a sport whose professional ecosystem is still evolving rather than entering one whose hierarchy has been established for decades.

None of those things exists to make a political statement, but rather because they create interesting management problems. The result is some of the freshest gameplay Football Manager has offered me in years. So the better question is whether the women’s game makes the FM26 more interesting. It does, in my eyes.

A world worth caring about

This is not a conclusion I reached after spending an evening sampling the women’s database. By this point, I have played roughly ten seasons in women’s football, beginning in France before continuing my career in the United States. That gave me enough time to move beyond the novelty of unfamiliar names and unfamiliar leagues. Players who initially felt like random entries in a database became trusted starters, transfer targets I had tracked for years and opponents whose strengths and weaknesses I knew by heart. What had started as an unexplored corner of Football Manager gradually became a football world with its own history.

The journey itself reinforced why the women’s game feels so refreshing. France offered a recognisable European structure, but with a hierarchy, transfer market and competitive landscape I still had to learn from scratch. Moving to the United States demanded another adjustment entirely. Salary caps, roster rules and the absence of promotion and relegation meant I couldn’t simply import the habits that had served me well in Europe. The tactical language remained familiar, but the way I built and maintained a squad did not.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped evaluating the feature and started caring about the save. To give it even greater longevity, I eventually used the editor to add my three daughters to the database. It was an act of unapologetic digital nepotism, although I prefer to think of it as a family-run academy operating under exceptionally flexible registration rules.

They quickly became far more than three edited players. Their careers gave the save a personal thread that ran alongside league tables, transfer windows and tactical experiments. I found myself following their development, debating which clubs would suit them, worrying about their playing time and celebrating international call-ups with an enthusiasm I’d normally reserve for winning trophies. Occasionally I even made decisions with all the ruthless professionalism you’d expect from a manager who had personally created the players in the first place.

Those three careers became my anchor. Clubs changed, teammates retired, new generations emerged, and I moved between countries, but I always had a reason to keep following the world I’d built.

That, more than anything else, convinced me the women’s game works. Football Manager has always excelled at transforming databases into stories. The women’s game does the same. Ten seasons later, I’m simply managing a football club in a world that now feels every bit as rich, personal and alive as any save I’ve ever played.

Football Manager feels unknown again

My main takeaway is not that women’s football transforms Football Manager into a fundamentally different game. It reveals how much of Football Manager had become familiar.

Over the years, I had accumulated thousands of tiny pieces of knowledge. I knew which clubs consistently produced talent, which leagues offered bargains and how the transfer market was likely to unfold. I could estimate the financial impact of promotion before the board had finished congratulating me. Even scouting had gradually become less about discovery than confirmation. Without realising it, experience had replaced curiosity.

A women’s save disrupts that comfort. Suddenly, I need to learn who the dominant clubs are, where the best young players emerge and which competitions offer the most realistic path forward. Contracts demand greater attention because talented players can leave long before a club receives meaningful compensation. Player development becomes a necessity rather than a luxury, while every scout report contains names I genuinely don’t recognise.

It is still unmistakably Football Manager. You’ll still obsess over tactical tweaks, argue with agents over contracts and spend forty minutes perfecting your pressing structure before conceding from a long throw in the 89th minute.

But the decisions surrounding those moments feel different. Limited budgets make every signing matter. Shorter contracts make every breakthrough player feel temporary. An unfamiliar football landscape means success comes from observation rather than memory. Instead of drawing on twenty years of accumulated Football Manager knowledge, you’re forced to build a new understanding from the ground up.

That’s what surprised me most. I expected the women’s game to broaden Football Manager’s scope. I didn’t expect it to restore a feeling I’d almost forgotten. For the first time in years, I wasn’t loading a save with a plan already mapped out in my head. I was exploring again. Every scout report, every academy graduate and every unexpected signing carried the possibility of discovering something genuinely new.

Women’s football doesn’t ask experienced Football Manager players to forget everything they know. It simply reminds them how much fun it is not to know everything yet.