Women’s football has been a part of FC for nearly a decade now, but while women’s teams haven’t featured in Career Mode until now, it certainly hasn’t been for want of trying on the part of the developers. We visited the home of Career Mode at EA Romania, where we sat down with Line Producer Andreas Wilsdorf and Principal Game Designer Alex Constantinescu to talk about the long-awaited introduction of women’s management. “It’s about time we invested more in women’s football.
Women’s football has grown so much that it’s about time it came to Career Mode.” Wilsdorf begins. “It’s really important, because we call it the ‘world’s game’, and we say ‘welcome to the club’ and ‘the club is for everyone’ so to speak, and having all sides of football together in one cosmos is really important.
” But while the desire to include the women’s game was strong, the major barrier to its introduction was securing enough licences, something that hadn’t happened until this year. “We had a critical mass in terms of licences, and once we were able to confirm with our licensing partners that critical mass can be reached and we have this number of leagues in the game, that’s when we started working on integrating women in Career Mode,” Constantinescu recalls. On the topic of adding more leagues in the future, while it’s something they would love to do, the matter isn’t up to them to decide.
“It’s completely out of our hands. We’d obviously love to do more, but when it comes to licences, it’s a whole different beast.” Integrating the women’s game wasn’t just a matter of sticking a few big teams in, either.
With a desire to reflect the current state of women’s football as accurately as possible, Wilsdorf credits the help of former players. “We have people in the company who are former professional players who won everything you can win from the Champions League to the World Cup and can give us the experience of what it’s like to be a professional player. What are the challenges in women’s football?” And these challenges are reflected in the mode itself.
Transfer fees and salaries are fractions of what they are in the men’s game. Player pools are much smaller, forcing you to rely more heavily on your Youth Academies, just as professional women’s teams often do. Women’s management in FC 25 is not only there to show players the highs of women’s football, but to expose them to the lows, and many of the issues the game still faces.
Some other interesting mechanics had been touted in the name of realism but ended up never being implemented. “We talked with women’s players on some things,” begins Wilsdorf, “like do we put in periods or players being pregnant, which happens in real-world football.” But despite the realism, it was determined that this simply isn’t a fun mechanic, with discussions with female players adding that these were simply not necessary challenges to include in the game.
One area that the team perhaps hope will become more realistic over time is the ability to swap seamlessly between managing men’s and women’s teams. While men have always managed women’s teams, it’s only been recently that female managers have had the chance to step into the men’s game. Top managers like Emma Hayes and Sarina Wiegmann have often been tipped to make the move, while Sabrina Wittmann taking the reins at German side FC Ingolstadt has been a landmark moment for women managing in the men’s game.
It might not feel realistic now but it is only going to become more and more normal as the stature and quality of the women’s game continue to improve, and FC 25 is certainly ahead of the curve on this. For anyone who would dismiss the inclusion of the women’s game as little more than a ‘box-ticking exercise’, you couldn’t be further from the truth. The effort that has gone into accurately representing the highs and lows unique to women’s football is deeply impressive, and the passion of the developers is clear to see.
Women’s football is here to stay in the FC series, and it’s only going to get bigger..
