FMDB Pro Puts Football Manager Ratings Inside Club Longlists

Sports Interactive launched FMDB Pro on 1 July 2026, a paid recruitment platform already used by more than 40 clubs and federations. The studio behind Football Manager turned its research network into a longlisting tool for first-team, academy and staff searches. Human ratings from more than 1,600 evaluators now enter real transfer work before video, modelling or a scout’s trip.

That is the shift. Clubs have poked around the game for years. FMDB Pro bills that habit as professional software and then hands the same grades to other vendors.

Longlisting Is Where Sports Interactive Wants In

FMDB Pro is built for the first cut, the stage when a recruitment team still has hundreds of names and has not yet spent analyst hours or air miles. Users search playing attributes, positions, contracts, injury history, international eligibility and governing-body endorsement rules, then compare profiles before anyone opens a video file.

Richard Trafford, Sports Interactive’s business development director, said the public launch followed two years of concentrated work on a product the studio thinks can lead its category.

We’re delighted to publicly launch FMDB Pro after two years of concentrated development effort on what we feel can be an industry-leading product.

Richard Trafford, Business Development Director, Sports Interactive

Dave Whitby, senior product owner, said the professional build goes deeper than the game on competitions and players, down to Spain’s seventh semi-professional tier in one example he cited. Football Manager still ships on a twice-yearly database cycle after Europe’s windows close. FMDB Pro is a live research desk sitting on the same network.

Coverage is the pitch. The platform holds more than 760,000 profiles across more than 7,000 competitions in 200 nations, spanning 65,000 clubs. Researchers can file as many as 50,000 changes a day. Biographical, contract and injury fields refresh weekly, with player statistics moving every Monday after the weekend, while attributes and calculated scores update on a quarterly cycle.

1,600 Evaluators, Five Matches Minimum

The load-bearing claim is not a spreadsheet scrape. Sports Interactive says every player and staff profile is built and kept by a person, then checked against other evaluators, regional quality control and algorithmic benchmarks. Anything that looks off is flagged. When a player has not yet been seen five times, the platform shows estimated ability scores and marks them as provisional.

Whitby said a single player can carry up to 250 data points, from spoken languages and preferred foot through technical, physical and mental scores, contract length, estimated value and a sided injury history. Trafford said the studio still wants evaluators at live games, and that Hudl video now saves travel when it does not.

HOW A PROFILE GETS INTO FMDB PRO

• Human owner: A named evaluator builds and maintains each player and staff file rather than a model inventing the grades.
• Five-match floor: No full data set is entered until the player has been watched at least five times.
• Season load: Evaluators average more than 43 matches a season, a large share of them live.
• Second pair of eyes: No profile is one person’s work; regional checks and peer calibration sit on top.

That network is the thing no mid-table club can copy on payroll. Trafford has said 1,600 evaluators would be almost impossible for a single club or federation to fund, and that Sports Interactive already had the team because it needed the game.

Every Profile Carries Ability, Eligibility and Money

Raw attributes are only the base layer. FMDB Pro adds 11 calculated outputs in three groups, so a longlist can be cut for quality, for paperwork and for cost before a scout is booked. Current Ability and Potential Ability run on a 1 to 200 scale, position-weighted and benchmarked across clubs, leagues and nations. A squad measure called CA16 averages a club’s 16 best-rated players so a target can be read against the group already there.

THE THREE CUTS ON EVERY PLAYER FILE

The eligibility block is the quiet killer of wasted scouting. FMDB Pro estimates whether a player or manager would clear the FA’s Governing Body Endorsement threshold and returns Auto Pass, Pass, Panel or Fail. Sports Interactive calls that a decision-support flag, not a ruling; the FA still decides on the file a club submits. Trafford has described a small national team that asked SI to find extra eligible players and was given an extra 5,000 names it did not already have.

Advanced Search runs more than 130 filters, with one-click presets for hidden gems, bargains and expiring contracts. Attribute analysis turns raw numbers into percentiles. Development charts overlay contract and injury events on a career curve. An Insights layer writes a plain-language report on style, strengths, squad fit and a comparison with players already at the club. Clubs that do not want another login can pull profiles through an API into tools they already run.

Which Clubs Are Already Using FMDB Pro?

Sports Interactive says more than 40 clubs, federations and football organisations already use the platform across first-team, academy and staff recruitment. The named partners are not a Premier League shopping list. They run from MLS and Liga MX through Croatia and Ligue 1 to English non-league, which is the point of a database that still tracks the seventh Spanish tier.

NAMED CLUBS WITH FMDB PRO ACCESS

Hashtag is the tell. Football Manager is front-of-shirt sponsor for Hashtag United Women after a 7-0 win over Billericay Town in the FA Women’s National League South, and through that agreement Hashtag United gained FMDB Pro access for player identification. A YouTube-born non-league club is on the same evaluator network as Club América and Monaco.

Above the named clubs sit two wider deals. Sports Interactive has a FIFA partnership at member-association level, so national teams can take a limited slice of the data (a Greece desk, in Trafford’s example, would see Greek players and then pay to widen the view). It also has a league-wide relationship with the Premier League and its clubs. Trafford has declined to name individual Premier League subscribers while counting FIFA and the league deal inside the “more than 40” total.

Everton Got the Database in 2008

The professional product is late. Recruitment staff have used Football Manager as a first reference for years, and Sports Interactive knew it. In 2008 Everton signed a first-of-its-kind deal that gave David Moyes and his staff official access. Studio director Miles Jacobson said at the time that SI had known clubs were using the game to research players, whether to buy or to check opposition.

André Villas-Boas, then José Mourinho’s chief scout at Chelsea, had already said he used the database as a reference tool. In 2014 Sports Interactive fed the same research into Prozone Recruiter, which made the search official for clubs on that platform. Jacobson said then that real managers would be finding players with a system familiar to anyone who had played the game. FMDB Pro is SI taking that feed back in-house, updating it daily, and selling it under its own name.

FROM A QUIET CLUB COPY TO A PAID PRODUCT

1. 2008: Everton gets official access to the Sports Interactive database for Moyes’ staff.
2. 2014: SI supplies Football Manager data to Prozone Recruiter for club searches.
3. 7 November 2025: Hashtag United Women add Football Manager as shirt sponsor and take FMDB Pro.
4. 20 November 2025: Dinamo Zagreb signs a multi-year deal that includes the professional database.
5. 28 November 2025: AS Monaco’s two-season partnership includes FMDB Pro access.
6. 3 December 2025: Vancouver Whitecaps become the first MLS club partner, with database access.
7. 1 July 2026: Sports Interactive puts FMDB Pro on public sale, with more than 40 organisations already inside.
8. 2 July 2026: Hudl becomes exclusive provider of event data and physical metrics.
9. August 2026: Pelly, a Welsh football operations platform, integrates FMDB Pro player data.

The game still cannot hold the full file at once, which is why a save never looks like the research desk. Whitby’s distinction holds: the consumer title is a playable slice. The professional build is the whole pyramid, refreshed on a working week rather than a patch schedule.

Hudl and Pelly Now Pull From the Same Network

The second-order effect is distribution. On 2 July 2026 Hudl became Sports Interactive’s exclusive provider of event data and physical metrics, with two-way sharing that also feeds future Football Manager editions. Hudl Wyscout is built into FMDB Pro, so a recruitment team with both subscriptions gets a one-click path into Wyscout from a qualitative longlist. SI player IDs map straight across. Hudl also picks up SI’s staff files, which most event-data products have never treated as a first-class search.

Big news for Hudl Wyscout! 🚀 We’ve partnered with Sports Interactive (@SportsInt), the studio behind Football Manager, to leverage our unique data assets and bring new value to football recruitment workflows globally.

Learn more: https://t.co/rtkJ3SS7UQ

— Hudl Wyscout (@Wyscout) July 2, 2026

Ty Chin, Hudl’s general manager of elite football, said the tie-up lets both firms put their data assets under one roof for clubs. Trafford, who worked at Hudl before joining SI, called the link the step that takes a human longlist into modelling and live scouting. In August 2026 Pelly said it would bring FMDB Pro player data into its operations platform so clubs could read those profiles beside other sources without hopping tools. The grades no longer live only behind an SI login.

Staff search is part of that spread. FMDB Pro rates head coaches, assistants, sporting directors and set-piece coaches with a current club, role and ability score, the same treatment the player files get. For a club hiring off the pitch, that is a cross-market list traditional phone trees have not offered.

Hashtag United and AS Monaco now query the same 1,600 evaluators. The paid wrapper is what makes that usage defensible in a recruitment meeting, and the Hudl and Pelly hooks are what carry a grade from a fifth-tier stand into software a Ligue 1 desk already has open.