Women's football lives immersed in its sweetest years. Every day more girls practice this sport, the League has become professional, attendance records are happening all over the planet and more platforms are committed to broadcasting their matches. The visibility of soccer players has reached levels unimaginable until now and publishers and production companies have launched to publish books and documentaries that explain the successes of these new referents.
A boom to which the video game sector is also pointing. The popular FIFA23 includes women's leagues for the first time, a company like Swipe Studios has launched Women's Football 2023, the first management video game exclusively for women's football, and the giant Football Manager has already announced that it is working to include this sport on its platform within of very little.
Few people know it, but one of those responsible for video game companies beginning to include women's football in their games is the Spanish soccer player Vero Boquete. The now Fiorentina player promoted a campaign on Change.org in 2013 to ask EA Sports to include women's football in FIFA. At that time she was the captain of the Spanish team and played for the Swedish Tyersö. Players such as Iker Casillas or Andrés Iniesta supported the initiative, which collected almost 50,000 signatures.
“Including female players in FIFA would encourage girls who, like me, love football to develop their passion, to compete to achieve their illusion and normalize the relationship between women and sport. Because the kids who play today will be tomorrow's adult society”, read the petition, which ended up prompting the game developer to include the first women's teams in 2016. In that edition, FIFA introduced three women on its local covers, with Alex Morgan alongside Leo Messi for the United States version. Seven years later, FIFA23 opens the doors of its international cover to a woman, the Chelsea player Sam Kerr. “She is a star on and off the pitch. He has done incredible things for the growth of this sport and represents a new generation of more inclusive soccer players, ”they explain to La Vanguardia from EA Sports.
In this edition, the company has included women's leagues for the first time in history. The Spanish will not be there yet, but the English Barclays Women's Super League and the French Division 1 Arkema will. "This is just the beginning of what we have planned for women's football and we look forward to sharing more exciting updates in the coming months."
The popularity of female soccer players is increasing and so are their sporting successes, an aspect that does not go unnoticed in FIFA23, which has just qualified Alexia Putellas as the star with the best score of all, with 92 points, one more than soccer players like Benzema , Mbappé or Lewandowski.
Times are changing and the latest to join this wave has been Football Manager. The British company announced last year that it is preparing the arrival of women's football in its sports management video game. There is no date for the launch yet and the great challenge is to create a solid database, something that has taken them 28 years to build in the men's category. “Finding information that is accurate is proving to be very complicated. Anyone who knows women's soccer knows how difficult this is, ”explains Tina Keech, the person in charge of the project, to La Vanguardia. For this reason, they have teamed up with fans, journalists and even clubs to collect all possible data and make an appeal: “If there is someone who has an epic database for a particular league or team, contact me on Twitter, I will be delighted. talk to anyone."
Keech believes that the introduction of women's football in video games will be beneficial for everyone: “I think we can bring a new audience to the fields. Some gamers have never seen a game and after starting to manage a team on our platform, they may want to go see one. At the same time, I also think that the rise of women's football is bringing more audience to Football Manager and who knows if there will be more female gamers in the future because of it. This new generation is a new market for both of us and that Football Manager is part of this growth makes me proud”, she concludes.
