In the three years since EA Sports dropped the Fifa branding, they have not felt the need to reinvent the wheel for their flagship game. EA FC 26 looks much the same as last year at first glance but is billed as being “powered by community feedback”, with more consistent goalkeepers, fewer rebounds from tackles and more responsive dribbling.
Listening to a dedicated fan base is rarely a bad thing, but it brings to mind the Henry Ford quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The horses are indeed faster and slicker than ever for this edition, but you are left wondering if we will ever get cars in the PS5 era.
Maybe football games have hit the point of diminishing returns. But with a new Fifa game reportedly in development under a different studio in advance of next summer’s World Cup, EA’s complacent monopoly, cemented since the fall of Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer, might finally be tested.
To their credit, many changes in EA FC 26 are thoughtful. Players come for different reasons: Ultimate Team for the thrill of pack openings and competitive online matches; Career Mode for offline immersion and story-building; and Clubs for the most authentic multiplayer experience, where you control one player alongside friends.
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All three modes see updates, and EA leans into their differences by offering two gameplay styles: Authentic and Competitive. Authentic is slower, offline-only, with more unpredictable touches and weather effects for realism. Competitive is smoother, more responsive and made for the fast-paced nature of online gaming.
Competitive gameplay suits Ultimate Team, still the game’s most popular mode. You can build a dream squad with rewards that may feature icons such as Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Diego Maradona and Roy Keane. New additions such as Gauntlets – timed tournaments with unique squad-building challenges – add variety and replayability.
Career Mode also feels more dynamic. A new “Manager Live” feature introduces seasonal challenges and updates the season to real-world results, rather than resetting to July with an open transfer window.
Taking over Manchester United with Andoni Iraola with the Red Devils struggling near the bottom of the table was a challenge without a top-class defensive midfielder, and felt more realistic than undoing the mess of Ineos’s team-building.
The addition of “unexpected events” is with the idea that no Career Mode will be the same. For me, it meant United had a food-poisoning outbreak before a trip to Anfield, and a warning from the board to tighten the budget following a home defeat to Sunderland. The virtual press will have had a field day.
In Clubs, individual players now fit into Archetypes, inspired by football legends and mapped to specific stat profiles. New cup competitions, including for the small-sided Rush mode, offer a refreshing alternative to the convoluted league progression system that they have surprisingly kept.
EA Sports lean into their position as a cultural behemoth within the gaming industry and within the sport in general. Ibrahimovic is the cover star for the Ultimate Edition and is marketed as a must-have player for the game’s most popular mode, Ultimate Team, after being absent for a couple of years – it would almost be easy to forget he had been in the game for more than 20 previous editions already.
Such is the business model of annual game releases, uninterrupted since 1993, and the company’s focus is on daily updates of the moneymaking live service Ultimate Team mode, something that was not there in previous generations of football games. Even if you had a developer who had 10 brilliant ideas to revolutionise the game, with the annual release model, would you use them all up in one year or spread them over five?
So, for EA FC 26, it is a case of fine-tuning familiar formulas and satisfying loyal players. But, as innovation slows, competition may be the only force to push true change forward in football games.
– EA Sports FC 26 (Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 (copy reviewed), Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S). Price €74.99 for standard edition, €109.99 for ultimate edition
