Modder creates women’s soccer database for Football Manager 18

A modder playing Football Manager, the world soccer management simulation by Sports Interactive and Sega, rewrote the game’s player database to convert it to a sim of womens’ world soccer, featuring the sport’s top stars.

Women’s Database V1.0, by FMGuru, was uploaded to Steam Workshop on Thursday. It’s compatible with Football Manager 18.

The database is set in the United Kingdom, mainly in England and Scotland, where there are four divisions of professional women’s soccer. National teams for Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland have also been included, along with 60 more elite players around the world to give managers some more transfer options. More than 3,500 players in total comprise the database.

FMGuru had modded in women’s soccer in past editions of Football Manager by creating individual leagues within a specific nation. This is an entirely rewritten database, removing all male players and starting all the women out as free agents, effectively generating a new league from random according to whom the user and the AI select. The FA Women’s Super League first and second divisions (20 teams in all) are available to manage, instead of placing women on the rosters of the 20-team Premier League, for example.

Women’s soccer has appeared in video games before, most notably as a separate mode in the EA Sports FIFA series going back to FIFA 16. But in that series, women’s soccer has not been part of any season-long or long-term mode in which personnel development, acquisition and player transfer play a role. There’s only a tournament mode in FIFA akin to the Women’s World Cup, featuring 12 national teams.