Developer Sports Interactive is celebrating a major milestone on Tuesday with the full release of Football Manager 26, the next iteration of its popular management simulation game across several platforms. With a brand-new engine and the first-ever inclusion of women's soccer, FM26 is breaking plenty of new ground -- but that's nothing unusual for the franchise.
While brands like EA Sports are all over real-world sports events these days with sponsorships, Football Manager has always prided itself on impacting soccer in a more fundamental way. Its hunger for accurate player statistics led to the creation of one of the most complete and easily accessible databases in soccer history over two decades ago. This caused FM to seep into real-world soccer, the video game becoming a tool for those involved in the sport and shaping their thought processes and the narratives around entire careers.
Speaking with Sports Interactive's Alan Granger, we dove behind the scenes of Football Manager's hunger for data and its history of blurring the line between video game and sport, from delivering intel to Everton FC to getting a shoutout for predicting Erling Haaland's greatness.
When did you start incorporating real-life stats into FM and why? One must imagine that it'd be a lot more efficient to just throw the dice and generate random numbers, from the developer perspective.
Our research team started in the 1990s because our fundamental goal was to create an accurate and faithful simulation of football. We knew that for players to become truly immersed in the world, the data had to be correct. That database has become a big part of what defines people's experience and the research is treated as an authority in the real world of football too.
While generating random attributes would be easier, it's the depth and authenticity of our real-life data that has made the game what it is today. We now have support in doing this from a network of more than 1,300 researchers around the world.
As someone from outside the sport, how does one find a soccer scout in the first place and what makes them reliable?
For us, it was never about finding traditional "scouts" in the club sense, at least not initially -- although there are currently and have been many professional scouts assisting. Our network started at a grassroots level with fanzine writers, because fanzine writers are always going to be the most honest about who they watch, week-in, week-out at the football clubs they support.
These were individuals who lived and breathed their club, offering a deep, passionate, and crucially impartial perspective. We then evolved to recruiting dedicated season-ticket holders -- fans who consumed every minute of their team's play and understood the squad's intimately. And since then the network has grown and grown.
What kind of information do the scouts bring to the development team? It has to be quite a detailed load, no?
Yes, it's an incredibly detailed and structured load of information. Each researcher is responsible for providing data across roughly 300 different fields for every player in their assigned area. This isn't just basic biographical data and career appearances. The fields comprehensively cover the full spectrum of a player's in-game attributes, which we break down into Mental, Technical, and Physical categories.
All of this raw data is then cross-referenced by our head researchers for consistency and then weighted and calibrated by our development team to ensure it functions correctly within the game's match engine. It's a massive undertaking, guided by a sizeable handbook to ensure everyone is working to the same exacting standards
How is that information then translated into actual in-game stats?
The translation from data to in-game performance is the core of our match engine. The hundreds of attributes we gather for each player don't exist in a vacuum -- they directly form and drive player behaviour within a full and complex simulation of football. Every single attribute -- from a defender's "Tackling" to a striker's "Composure" -- is weighted, checked, and analysed against all the others. And they are also checked against other comparable examples that we have within our database.
This process ensures that the interactions between players on the pitch are realistic and that the match plays out as it should. A player's "Decisions" attribute will influence when they make a run, their "Passing" and "Vision" will dictate the quality of through-balls, and their "Stamina" will affect their performance in the final minutes. All of these are combined together to give as accurate a reflection as possible.
The 'wonderkids' are some of the most popular player types in every iteration. How can you estimate the growth potential of a player who's just starting their career? That's not as quantifiable as, say, passing accuracy, right?
No, it's not. Predicting a young player's future is one of the most challenging aspects of what we do, precisely because it's not as quantifiable as a current technical skill.
To reflect this inherent uncertainty, most young players in FM have their potential ability defined as a range, rather than a fixed number. For example, the very best prospects are given a "potential ability" of -10. This is a code that means, in each new save game, the game will randomly assign them a final potential ability between 170 and 200 out of 200. So, in one career, they might become a world-beater, and in another, they might "only" become a very good player.
This system reflects the real-world variance in how a career can pan out due to injuries, mentality, and opportunities, while still being a projection of what our network believes they could achieve. Of course, real life is hard to model and predict, but we base these ranges on the evidence we have and comparable examples from the past.
Soccer itself undergoes a steady evolution in how it's played. Do you have to adapt the way you rate your players and interpret the data you gather to stay on top of these 'meta' changes? Can you give us an example of that -- perhaps the importance of some stats changing over the years?
Absolutely. We're always watching and studying real football, and that evolution directly reflects in how we develop the game and interpret our data. It's a constant process of adaptation. A perfect example for the upcoming FM26 is our introduction of In-Possession (IP) and Out-of-Possession (OOP) tactical shapes.
This wasn't just a new feature for users; it required a fundamental refit of our entire database. We had to reassess all player roles to fit these new tactical concepts. More importantly, it meant a complete overhaul of the tactical data for every manager in the game -- redefining how they line up in different phases of play, their preferred formations, and their pressing triggers. This then directly impacts how the game plays out, making it a more authentic simulation of the complex systems used in modern football.
Were there any particular challenges incorporating women into the database for FM26, or were the network and methods you've developed over the years a good fit to expand the database in that direction without issues? It must have been daunting to start out at zero again.
There were challenges, of course. While our methods provided a strong framework, the main issue was the stark lack of other data out there to cross-reference. With the men's game, we have a wealth of historical and contemporary data from numerous sources to verify our findings.
For the women's game, the information we initially found was often patchy and inconsistent -- it was very bare and even for some of the top players in the game there were basic stats like appearances and goals that were incorrect or missing. Furthermore, we couldn't just rely on our existing network. We had to actively tap into the women's football community to find the right people with the necessary expertise and passion. We also relied heavily on our contacts in football to guide us in the right direction to find statistics.
This was a project spearheaded by Tina Keech -- our Head of Women's Football Research, supported by Chloe Woolaway our Women's Football Research Coordinator, and they have built a dedicated team that has now grown to more than 40 people. It's a team that is still growing, and with the launch, we are hoping to build and evolve this database, just as we have with the men's game over the decades.
Your database has become a valuable resource for real-world clubs. When was the first time you realized that you suddenly had an impact on the actual soccer world?
One of those moments was when André Villas-Boas, during his time as a young manager at Chelsea, spoke publicly about how he used Football Manager as a resource for scouting and player analysis. Here was a manager at one of the world's biggest clubs, openly crediting our game with playing a role in his real-world football process. That was a definitive moment where we realised the impact we were having.
Since then, we've seen this influence more and more. It's not just confined to managers; many of the modern press pack in UK football grew up with the game and have that data background from FM, which shapes how they analyze and talk about the sport. That was the moment it truly clicked that we were no longer just a game, but a genuine part of the football ecosystem. And we've seen countless examples with other managers in the game who have references learning about elements of management through Football Manager.
What real-world impact has the database had so far? Can you give some examples for clubs that used it (and perhaps continue to use it today) and athletes who made it big because of it?
Our first formal deal with a club was in 2008 when we worked with Everton FC, It was the first deal of its kind for either the gaming or the football industry and really paved the way. Since then, we've worked with a number of clubs across the world, all of whom use the database in different ways, primarily to shape their recruitment strategy and identify potential transfer targets.
Regarding athletes who "made it big because of it" -- it's more accurate to talk about players who gained early fame or a cult following among fans because of their high potential in the game, which continues to this day. This is a core facet of the game; discovering these young players and then helping them realise their potential within the game world.
A perfect example of this is Erling Haaland, who was well known to FM players long before he hit the mainstream. When he got his move to Borussia Dortmund, the user who had bought him in game was part of Haaland's story -- to them they own a piece of that success.
When he signed for Dortmund there was then a blurring of the lines moment when the club references his Football Manager notoriety, which validates our authority in this space.
For those who don't make it -- there are many factors at play that the research can't account for but we're very happy with our success rate of predicting who will become elite in future, and it's definitely one of the key things the game has become known for.