Ongoing Comments by EA Sports FC 26
Blog Andrew Joseph 19 Sep , 2025 0
Football (or football, if you are not us like me) hasn't changed much in the past few decades. Of course, there are new rules, improved tactics, and more money involved in modern games – but essentially, it's still about kicking the ball to one goal, not other teams. So, how can I improve when the sport it simulates doesn’t introduce huge changes when it doesn’t introduce huge changes? For me, it's about quality of life updated, while FC 26 has spades. You've heard the word “a thousand deaths” but it's more like “repair with a thousand pieces of tape.” This is not to say that every issue is solved, and that many micro-issues like micro-issues have brought player conversions and weird tackle animations back from FC 25, but at least in my early days, FC 26 was heading in the right direction in almost every way.
An amazing example is the new game preset. In the past, everyone has been using the same gameplay, whether it’s jumping into competitive games on the Ultimate Team or trying to play against CPU opponents in Manager mode. This year, EA splits between two different presets: competition and reality. With competitive presets, you can expect fast-paced action and smarter AI teammates, and you may get used to the previous FC/FIFA games. At the same time, real people will be more realistic than what you see in real life every weekend. Players are slower and you need to use tactical intelligence to get into the scoring position.
The most important part of this change is that the two options do not affect each other. This means that EAs can adjust the competition mode without changing the balance of the real mode, something they couldn't do in previous FCs. I've only played about twelve games so far, but they've felt different in valuable ways. For different reasons, players participate in various modes of FC 26: Career mode players want a game as close to real life as possible, while the ultimate team and club players want fair, balanced online competition. In the past, these two ideals sometimes faced each other, so they gave us two completely independent play styles, and EA could serve both communities.
The weird thing about the implementation is that the real presets are limited to offline mode only. This means you can't even use it in lineup combat, even though they are the only single player content on the Ultimate Team. I hope to add it in the future, as all single player content is not included by default, especially when it's completely finished with the new version of the Season Pass, which is weird.
Before we make some other positive changes, let's end that season because that's one of the biggest debates for me. Last year, EA introduced a paid season pass to FC 25 at the end of the cycle, so we knew it was coming, but seeing it did stab on the first day. You can ignore it and stick with the free version of the pass, and you can even earn enough game currency to buy it without spending the actual money, but I think it's probably the worst season pass we've seen in sports games.
The problem with FC 26's season pass is that you not only win rewards for Ultimate Team, where people already (unfortunately) have the ability to spend money. You also earn a lot of rewards for clubs, players careers and manager careers. The latter is really shocking because one of the biggest draws of FC 26 is that icons and heroes are finally available in manager mode. For the first time ever, you can play classic players like Luis Figo, Toni Kroos, and Julie Foudy and put them in your manager mode save. This should be a revelation, but EA made a weird decision to lock many of these players behind the season pass.
There are several reasons for this frustrating. First, you may not be able to use Manager mode alone to get enough XP for them. EA may have more ways to earn XP for non-ethnic team participants, but with the current build, you will need If you want to complete enough passes to claim all Career Mode rewards, dive into this loot box to open the simulator. Even for someone who mainly participates in the ultimate team, this change is awful. I already know how bad the monetization ability of FC is, and I hate to see it expand to a larger player base in a way that feels harsh.
As if this isn't frustrating enough, it's unlikely that a career mode player will earn enough final team-specific currency to buy a season pass only in that mode. This means you need to spend money to unlock players like Gianfranco Zola, Miroslav Klose and Park Ji-Sung. Remember, this is only the first season pass. If FC 26 continues to lock icons and heroes behind future passes, we may see ideal players like Ronaldinho, Ruud Gullit and Johan Cruyff stuffed it behind the paywall as well.
Unfortunately, EA tries to get more money from the player group than usual to get more money. The Ultimate Team Player is milked, which is bad enough, but now you can’t even enjoy your offline career mode without feeling spending money.
What makes it even more painful is that most patterns offer interesting updates to their tried-and-tested formulas this year. For example, the new manager Live Hub allows you to delve into specific challenges and win new jerseys for your club. These feel like the next step towards the historical mode, such as the Black League Options MLB Performanceas you face challenges, recreate the double double of Jamal Musiala with Bayern Munich, or the glory that mid-level clubs like SK Rapid or Strasbourg bring to Europe. The classic version of Career Mode is still there, but Manager Live provides you with a list of spinning challenges that will test your skills on and off the court.
Even the team is home to several small but meaningful changes. From the return of the tournament to the ability to choose the evolutionary cosmetics, everything is carefully crafted to provide improvements that fans have been proposing over the years. We had to wait a month or two to see the effects of the slower ultimate team strength curve, and I hesitated to judge the stability of the servers until they live for everyone, but my early experiences were positive.
Although I am not a club player, the new prototype has certainly attracted my interest. Without a dedicated team, I'm unlikely to spend too much time in the club, but the Archteype system seems to be an improvement in the progressive approach to dealing with untrained eyes. While the Yuan people will certainly settle down through this pattern in the next few weeks, having this clear forward momentum makes me wish I had 10 friends to play with.
I have more games this weekend, but so far, FC 26 seems to offer enough quality of life changes and I feel more positive about the On-Pitch product after a few years. But I can’t help but be upset about how huge monetization of each model becomes. I always thought it would be relatively easy to ignore spending the extra money unless you want to compete in the highest competition at Ultimate Team, but this year is much worse. Now, even the players in the career mode are not safe. FC 26 is by far the most craving for EA, and I can’t help but worry about where we are going next.