Games

Football Manager Has Gay Players

Avatar photo

30 October 2017

By Alex Khalil

Launching on 10th November, Football Manager 2018 will become the first game of its kind to see in-game players be able to come out as gay. The developer, Sports Interactive, didn’t so much as announce the news, but the beta came out and fans noticed messages like this:

This move is of note, as there are no openly gay professional footballers in any of the world’s major leagues with homophobia still being rampant in sport around the world. You won’t see real-world players coming out in the game, obviously, instead, it uses computer-generated players that populate the younger teams who can come out. Game director Miles Jacobson said that the response to a player coming out would be ‘right okay, let’s move on’.

‘Everything will carry on perfectly normally because that’s what we’ve have seen happen [in other sports]. It’s not a message that everyone is going to see in their game. It is quite rare, but we want it to be a positive thing.’

He also talked about ‘normalising the issue’. He said:

‘We are not going to be able to change the mind of someone who is homophobic, we don’t have that power, and if someone has that issue and decides not to buy the game for that reason then, to be honest, I feel really sorry for them.’

“Hopefully, it will make some people look up and think, ‘This is ridiculous.’

A good move from them, as we haven’t really seen anything like this. FIFA did put a strip in the game that was rainbow themed in support of LGBT rights though.

Like this article? Please share!