For years, it’s been football’s worst-kept secret: professional clubs quietly mining the Football Manager database to help them unearth soccer’s wonderkids. Now it’s a secret no more, with the game’s makers turning that very database into a professional recruitment tool.

FMDB Pro contains 760,000 profiles of players (male and female) and staff from around the world, all researched by the same team of 1,600 evaluators that provide the data for the long-running video game. Sports Interactive, the game’s makers, claim it’s “the biggest database in the world” for this kind of football data, and it’s already being used by more than 40 clubs to help with their real-world recruitment.

It’s quite the transformation for a game that started life more than 30 years ago, coded by two teenage brothers in their bedroom.

The Football Manager Database

Anyone who’s played Football Manager recently will appreciate the sheer depth of the game’s database. Hundreds of thousands of players with ratings for dozens of individual physical and mental attributes, such as finishing, passing, aggression, leadership and pace. Not to mention full career histories and other personal stats, such as height and weight.

The problem with the Football Manager database from a professional scouting perspective, however, is that its out-of-date the moment its published. The game does two major database updates every year, following the closure of the transfer windows in Europe. It also has limited depth: the constraints of making a game playable mean it’s impractical to load more than a fraction of the total database at any one time.

FMDB Pro overcomes both those issues. The database receives up to 50,000 changes every day, with player stats updated every Monday after a weekend’s round of games. In terms of depth, it goes right down to the seventh semi-professional tier of Spanish football, to give one example, much deeper than players can start from in the game. “That’s one of the key differentiations between us and the game,” said Dave Whitby, senior product owner at Sports Interactive. “We go much deeper in terms of the number of competitions that we cover, the number of players that we cover.”

FMDB Pro lets clubs refine the search for players and staff using all manner of criteria, not least their expected transfer fee and wage demands. Searches can be based on physical criteria too, so if clubs are looking for a fast, left-footed winger they can search specifically for that type of player. “There’s nearly 250 data points on a player, and each one of those can be fine-tuned with a search range or a specific number, and you can just keep building and building and building on these,” said Whitby.

The FMDB Pro database also has a number of preset searches, including “wonderkids”, a nod to one of the game’s iconic player categories. You genuinely can use the database to hunt down the next Messi .

One of the biggest recruitment challenges football clubs face now is restrictions on international signings. In the post-Brexit era, English clubs have much tighter criteria to meet if they want to sign a player or staff member from Europe, for instance, but the FMDB Pro database includes a Governing Body Endorsement calculator that provides an estimate of whether that person has the necessary number of points to come and work in England.

That kind of data isn’t only of interest to English clubs. “If you’re a foreign-based club and you want to see whether your players are eligible to sell into England, this kind of data is invaluable there as well,” said Whitby.

Data on players with multiple nationalities is also incredibly valuable to national teams, especially smaller countries that don’t have a huge pool of players to pick from. Richard Trafford, Sports Interactive’s director of business development, cites one example where a nation asked them to find players who would qualify to play for them. “It was quite a small nation,” he said. “We found an extra 5,000 for them that they didn't know about.”

Benefits For Football Manager

As much as the game’s attention to detail has led to the creation of FMDB Pro, the development of the scouting tool could also have benefits for the game.

For example, FMDB Pro has formed a partnership with Hudl Wyscout that allows clubs to watch video highlights of players they’ve shortlisted. Those video tools will also be available to the game’s researchers, meaning they can scout players without having to leave home. “We will still encourage our scouts, or evaluators as we’re now calling them, to go to as many live games as possible, but you know you can save a lot of time by video scouting,” said Trafford.

Data gathered from external sources can also be fed back into the database, which will ultimately benefit the game. “For future Football Managers, this should be a big part of what we include in in the whole creation of the of the title," said Trafford.

And in a year when the revamped Football Manager 2026 has taken a barrage of criticism from fans of the series, Trafford was keen to stress that FMDB Pro hasn’t been a distraction for the game’s developers. “It’s really important to note that the team is not the same team that works on the game,” he said.

“We’ve had a couple of years with the game where we’ve had to work very, very hard to move to a new engine, and this hasn’t been a distraction because they work in a completely different area.”

In an industry awash with money, particularly when it comes to recruiting players that can cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, is there a chance that the FMDB Pro spin-off will end up becoming a bigger business than the game itself?

Sports Interactive had a turnover of around £72 million ($96 million) in 2024, which was the last year in which there was a full game release. Trafford was coy about how big an opportunity FMDB Pro may prove to be. “To be completely honest, it’s a little bit unknown,” he said.

Trafford claimed the business was already profitable, with about 40 clubs already signed up. “Pricing is relatively bespoke,” he added. “Depending upon what the club wants and levels of access: whether they want Europe or England or the world or women’s football or they’re a national team, it’s very different. But we think that this is going to fill a really interesting gap in the market. Nobody actually does this on this scale.”