Football Manager is one of the best-selling video game franchises in the world. To mark the game's 20th anniversary, they've given us exclusive access into their studios here in London to see how the game is made. The way.

That I see it is I'm actually making the game for me, and it just so happens there are a few million other people like me out there. Games aren't cheap, so we're determined to make the best value for money game each year so that people are really getting a lot of play time out of their 40 pounds, 50 pounds that they've worked so hard to try and get. The game's.

Changed dramatically since the 2000s, and what was once Little Circles bouncing around on a green rectangle is now a fully-fledged 3D simulation with as many differences off the pitch as on it. So there's something new that's being added in this year's game that's going to make all the difference. In a much requested feature in the community for the first time ever and a rarity in video games, you're going to be able to pick up right where you left off in last year's game, transfer your save game, and start up right again in this year's.

I'm going to tell you a secret. We had it working with FM23 and FM 22 saves, but we weren't fully confident that it was going to work when it was out there.

Let's see how the new game looks. Okay, fair enough. This isn't the new game. But when he isn't trashing me at table football, nick Madden is the man in charge of everything that happens on the pitch.

We partnered with this amazing football data partner, and they have given us data from actual matches. They're recording a general match. There's no motion capture dots on a player. Oh, nice. And then we've developed technology where we can mix all that animations at one time. It's really cool. It's a new technique in the industry. It's called motion matching. A lot of big games use it.

Motion matching is the hot new thing in video games. The team here used it to take action captured from actual football matches and apply that into the game itself. Nick showed me just what that looks like under the hood of Football Manager 2024. There was a nice little run that player made there where he started making a run curving his bit coming through.

Yeah, with the the new player rotations that we've added in this year, it's about a player recognizing the space that's maybe void. We've improved every player's movement and there, he's lost his defender. He's come off the line. But a great save.

Now, English football fans were recently celebrating history from the Lionesses won Euro 2022 at Wembley. But Football Manager doesn't feature women, despite being based in the same city as a stadium where England won its first major tournament since 1966. When is women's football going to be in Football Manager?

Next year.

Next year.

And we should have done it already. If we want women's football to be as successful as the men's game, it needs people like us, like the media, to actually be putting the investment in.

But Football Manager doesn't do things by halfs, and getting all the stats right for every woman in the game is taking some time.

I think we probably underestimated how much needed to be done. So obviously, from research, from my point of view, I came in, there was absolutely nothing.

What are you hoping the legacy of this will be?

Well, firstly, I think, yeah, legacy of the women's game is really important. I think we should remember where we've come from and those players that have really driven for the game and all that fighting that has gone on for equality in the game, finally bringing it out.

People.

Will look back and go, Yes, this was great. To be part of that growth and seeing where we can fit in, it is really exciting. Also, I just want my daughters to go and go, Yeah, my mom had done that. My mom had done that.

Getting women into football manager is all part of one big mission: getting the game as close to reality as it can be so people can escape theirs.

It goes back to giving people an escape from the real world that they don't enjoy as much to be able to escape into a job that they want to do but haven't had the opportunity to do as being a football manager.

This is getting very philosophical.

We are quite philosophical about the way that we make gains. I think everyone in life should try to strive to be the best that they can be because you're only on this planet once, so you may as well try your hardest at whatever you choose to do.