even though Ultimate Team In EA Sports FC 25, the game seems to be taking steps towards being less frustrating through repeat saves, more casual friendlies and fatter rewards, while it also continues to become increasingly monetised – this year with the introduction of a paid premium season pass on top of its package.
I’ve been playing manager career mode for as long as I can remember, but as the mode has become ossified in recent versions – with persistent bugs between games and a lack of meaningful gameplay features – I find myself leaning more towards online mode out of necessity rather than choice.
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During the recent EA Sports FC 25 preview event, EA talked a lot about creating more social spaces and less intense competition in its latest football game, but really, I think the best way to relieve the tension in FC 25 is to offer a viable alternative to UT in the form of a satisfying, realistic, and compelling career mode.
Excitingly, looking through the list of major new features in FC 25, Career Mode seems to be the big winner.
First and foremost, FC IQ is a massive overhaul of the tactical engine that underpins FC’s gameplay, doing away with the outdated and vague “go around to the back” and “fall back when attacking” instructions, the elusive high, medium, and low work rates, and even some of the basic positions like RWB, LWB, and CF.
“FCIQ is a universal feature of the FC, but it also fits perfectly into Career Mode,” said Career Mode Producer Andreas Wilsdorf.
“I feel like everything we’ve brought to the game, whether it’s the customisation, the playable women’s career mode, or the playable youth teams, which has never been seen in a football game, it feels like a really meaningful update, along with bringing in community feedback from more countries, a social media system, a new UI that allows them to create the game they want.”
FC IQ replaces the old backend system with a range of new player roles that you can set up on your campaign map to show the fluid movement of your players on the pitch.
As well as instantly recognisable roles like defensive midfielder and full-back, you can also implement more modern, complex tactical plans, with EA using the examples of a ‘false full-back’, where a player nominally starts at full-back but moves inside to midfield when you’re in possession, such as Arsenal’s Oleksandr Zinchenko or Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold, and a ‘half-winger’, where a central midfielder with a high cross-field presence pushes outwards to slot the ball in, such as Manchester City’s Kevin De Bruyne.
While it remains to be seen how much of a revolution these updated tactics will bring over the course of a full season of gameplay, career mode has been crying out for more variety for years, as both your own team and the AI teams you face in the same matches can feel one-note.
Player roles are designed to add much-needed tactical flexibility to FC 25, which has started to look seriously outdated compared to more complex sims like Football Manager, and they already don’t look as set in stone as the tactics available in FIFA and FC 24.
“I don’t think you can underestimate the impact that FC IQ has on the pitch,” said Paul Parsons, lead producer of EA Sports FC games. “Player movement is so important to the gameplay, not just moment to moment – where the players are at what time is key to success. I think when you look at this feature, your interaction with it tends to be menu-based, but it does carry over in a one-to-one way when you’re on the pitch.”
“If you play a match and look at the heat map afterward, you can see it has a very real impact. We do have other features like pro fouls, new play styles, etc. that add to the base gameplay.”
However, not all players can easily fit into any role and play it perfectly. Every player has a “+” role that they are comfortable with, and world-class players can also have a “++” role. This means that they are naturally good at the job they are assigned and are able to get better timing and control their space more effectively.
In career mode you’ll have the added ability to coach players in different roles, or improve their familiarity with their current roles, so hopefully there’ll be a better sense of how your tactical setup progresses and evolves – whereas previously you might have just set it up once and played as many seasons as you liked.
AI managers also apparently use these more diverse strategies, and should have dynamic AI behavior, meaning you won’t be playing out the exact same game plan over and over again.
“So you can develop characters, take a player from a false nine to a poacher, and that takes weeks or months, depending on how good the player’s stats are,” explains Pete O’Donnel, lead career mode designer. “But then, you still have the coach, or you can make a transfer, so we want to give players options. Maybe you want to go the coaching route, or change my tactics to suit the most important player. So there are lots of options, and that’s what we want to convey.”
“It’s about minimizing and maximizing. If you don’t tweak too much, you don’t make too big of a mistake. But if you do tweak, you can hire coaches to improve, change the development program, really start growing and see those green plus points appear – but if you don’t have those green plus points and they’re still doing it, that’s OK, but we want them to get better and run better in less time, that kind of thing.”
Another aspect of Career Mode that looks dated is the visuals. There’s a reason the community values young players with real face scans over anything else – stock player models simply don’t deliver an immersive experience. But for FC 25, EA is introducing “Cranium”, an overhaul of how players without face scans are represented in the game, with a much closer resemblance to the target.
For players who support teams outside of the ‘big five’ leagues, having a squad made up of generic players is one of the most off-putting aspects of Career Mode, especially when you eventually get to the upper leagues and start mixing realistically scanned players into your squad, so Cranium is a very welcome addition – especially as it applies to youth team players too.
“We’ve studied the feedback from FC 24 and you can see that in the updates we’ve made for youth,” Wilsdorf said. “We know a famous question is ‘Why does my 14-year-old have a big beard?’ All the issues we read, we’re working on addressing – absolutely.
“What I love about the Career Mode community is that they’re just as passionate as football fans. They’re very vocal and hold us accountable for the future of the mode. We’re completely honest that not every year we update it is as good as it should be. I think what we really wanted to show this year is that we care about Career Mode. Career Mode is really important to us, and I hope it delivers.
But ultimately, Career Mode also benefits greatly from the new 5-a-side match type that replaces VOLTA, Rush, a short-sided game type played on smaller pitches, where offside starts in the offensive zone and serious fouls are punished with a “blue card”.
You can play Rush with your friends in Ultimate Team or Pro Club, but in Career Mode you can compete in Rush tournaments with your youth team for a set point over the season, either using their current overall performance to gauge their ability or tapping into the potential of your youth players to simulate how good they would be in youth football – a bit like when Erling Haaland scored nine goals for Norway U-20.
Not only does this sound better than international management, mixing in the hard work of mid-season, but it would also introduce more interaction with your youth squad and developing your own players – a much-loved aspect of career mode and a long-requested new feature.
“When you play Rush, you have a completely new experience,” said Kantcho Doskov, the game’s design director. “Even myself, I’ve played FC and FIFA for years, but when I play Rush, I’m like, ‘Wow, this is different,’ right? You play with your friends, you control your own characters, but you’re always in the action. It’s not like a traditional club where you can go for minutes without touching the ball, you’re always online, you’re always close to the ball or defending the ball, it’s much more engaging.”
“With Rush, we have the opportunity to think ‘what can we do’?” Wilsdorf said. “Imagine if you could play with a young Messi – that’s what we thought when we brainstormed – we wanted to let’s do something with young people that has never been done before. On the one hand, it’s the opportunity, on the other hand, it’s about getting things done.”
In addition to these core additions, Career Mode has also added some new ways to play, including a fully integrated Women’s Career Mode with its own transfer market, the careers of stars such as Pirlo, Beckham and R9 (if you pre-order, boo), and a new feature called “Live Start”, which allows you to select a real season in real life.
At first I wasn’t sure how much of a problem this would be, but then I thought back to all those cool moments I saved of teams doing well in the Champions League, only to have the “wrong team” come through, or the game turn out differently than I wanted, so this has been a good move.
However, from what we’ve seen of EA Sports FC 25 so far, the game is finally re-emphasizing career mode as a viable option, which can only be a good thing for the series.
