FMDB Pro: How the team behind Football Manager built a real-world recruitment tool
Written by
Simon Austin
July 2, 2026
For decades, one of football’s worst-kept secrets has been that clubs have quietly turned to Football Manager’s database as an early reference point for recruitment.
The database – assembled over more than three decades by a vast network of researchers at Sports Interactive – has long been used informally by recruitment departments as a first reference point about players.
In 2008, Everton signed a first-of-its-kind deal that gave manager David Moyes and his backroom staff official access to the database.
Sports Interactive’s Studio Director, Miles Jacobson, said at the time: “We’ve known for a while that teams use the game to research certain players, whether to buy or to check out the opposition.”
The database was never really intended for that purpose – but now Sports Interactive have built something that is.
FMDB Pro is a stand-alone intelligence platform for the professional game. It draws on the same research infrastructure underpinning Football Manager, but is designed specifically for recruitment staff at clubs, leagues and federations.
Sports Interactive’s Business Development Director, Richard Trafford, said: “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.
“Football Manager, and the iconic database behind it, has helped shape modern football culture with its depth of data and accuracy. Now, this new FMDB Pro team has enhanced that dataset into a professional platform that offers a scalable recruitment tool for clubs, organisations and federations across all levels of football.”
The platform is intended to sit at the start of the recruitment process: the long-listing and early-filtering stage, before analyst hours, video work and a scout’s air miles are committed to a target.
World’s largest evaluation network
The engine of the platform is the world’s largest evaluation network.
Sports Interactive have a 1,600+ evaluation network and every player and staff profile is built and maintained by an evaluator – a real person – as opposed to being generated from data.
A player must be watched a minimum of five times before any data is entered against their profile, with evaluators averaging more than 43 matches a season – a significant number of which are live.
There is also a thorough review process. No profile is the work of just one person and assessments are cross-checked and calibrated against peers.
They are then passed through layers of regional quality control and run against algorithmic validation to benchmark against referenced players. Anything questionable is flagged.
What a profile looks like
Every player is assessed across more than 250 data points – biographical and registration details, technical, physical and mental attributes, tactical and positional profiles, contract information and injury history.
A sample FMDB Pro player profile, bringing together attributes, estimated value, injury history, development curve and GBE status (player shown is fictional)
Sitting on top of that raw material are the platform’s 11 calculated outputs, which fall into three groups: ability, eligibility and money.
For the first group, ability, every player carries a Current Ability and a Potential Ability score on a 1 to 200 scale – one for how good they are now and one for how good they might become.
These numbers are position-weighted and benchmarked across clubs, leagues and nations.
When a player hasn’t yet cleared the five-match threshold, the platform shows estimated versions instead, clearly flagged as provisional – so a thin profile reads as an honest “we’re not sure yet” rather than a gap someone forgot to fill.
There is also a neat squad-level measure called CA16, which averages a club’s 16 best-rated players to give you a benchmark.
For eligibility, FMDB Pro calculates Homegrown status under Premier League and EFL rules, works out Governing Body Endorsement (GBE) bands, and produces a GBE score estimating whether a player or manager would clear the FA’s points threshold for a work permit: Auto Pass, Pass, Panel or Fail.
Sports Interactive are careful to call this a decision-support indicator rather than a ruling — the final word always rests with the FA and the evidence a club submits. But as an early-stage filter, it quietly kills a familiar kind of wasted effort: falling for a player you were never going to be allowed to sign.
The third group is money. FMDB Pro generates an estimated value, asking price and guideline wage for each player, built from ability, age, position, contract situation, injury record and competitive context rather than scraped from a transfer aggregator.
These are indicative benchmarks to anchor an early conversation, rather than being formal valuations. They are also best read in pairs – an estimated value against an asking price; a current ability against a potential.
The staff dimension
The platform applies the same treatment – profile, ability rating and defined role – to the team behind the team.
There is a searchable, sortable list of Head Coaches, Assistants, Sporting Directors, Set Piece Coaches and more, each with a current club, role and ability score.
For a club trying to strengthen off the pitch – and looking to go beyond existing networks – this kind of structured, cross-market view is something traditional networks have never really offered.
Speed
Advanced Search runs to more than 130 filters across both players and staff – age, position, footedness, physical profile, contract status, league strength, free agents only – and bundles the most common recruitment questions into one-click presets such as Hidden Gems, Bargains and Expiring Contracts.
The intention is to compress long-listing from days of manual cross-referencing into a single afternoon, with a clear rationale attached to every name that comes up.
FMDB Pro's Advanced Search, with more than 130 filters — here narrowing the market to attacking midfielders aged 18–24 in Spain, France and Germany, above a set pace threshold
Above search sits analysis. Attribute Analysis converts raw numbers into percentile rankings, so you can see at a glance whether a player is genuinely an outlier among his peers or at their level.
Development charts track how a player’s ability has moved over his career, now overlaid with contract and injury events to explain the peaks and the dips.
And FMDB Insights, the platform’s AI layer, generates a plain-language report on each player: an executive summary, a more detailed read on style, strengths and weaknesses, an assessment of how they would fit the squad, and a direct comparison with players already at the club.
FMDB Pro maps its player IDs directly to Hudl Wyscout, minimising the time between identifying a player and watching them.
And for clubs that would rather have the data inside their own systems rather than logging into a website, FMDB Pro offers an API – a developer-friendly way to pull player profiles, ratings and outputs automatically into the tools a club is already using.
Scale and reach
There are profiles of more than 760,000 people in the database: more than 500,000 active men’s players, more than 40,000 active women’s players, more than 210,000 non-playing staff and 10,000-plus match officials, across 65,000 clubs and more than 7,000 competitions in 200 nations.
Coverage spans the men’s and women’s games. The data refreshes on a set cycle – biographical, contract and injury information weekly, attributes and calculated outputs quarterly – and every screen carries a “last updated” timestamp so a user can see exactly how current the picture in front of them is.
More than 40 clubs, federations and football organisations are already using the platform across first-team, Academy and staff recruitment – including Vancouver Whitecaps, GNK Dinamo Zagreb, Club América and Hashtag United – and Sports Interactive has partnerships with FIFA at member-association level and a league-wide relationship with the Premier League and its clubs.
The database that started as a game has grown into a professional tool.
FMDB Pro is offering free trial access to clubs and organisations. To arrange a trial or find out more, contact contact@fmdb.pro
Follow Us
For latest updates, follow us on X at @ground_guru
