2025 is shaping up to be a big year for EA Sports FC, but when isn’t it?
In the endless cycle of annual football fixtures that EA Sports FC has tried so hard to replicate, it now has to prove itself on two fronts: not just year-on-year, but also as a new franchise that has a point to prove.
With the launch of FC 24, EA Sports hit the ground running with PlayStyles, one of the most transformative fantasy additions to its core gameplay in years, giving players soccer superpowers and opening up a whole new metagame of combinations and strategies.
However, while this is a typical ‘behind the box’ feature, it is also destined to be a distraction for more down-to-earth fans as their friends in the pub or family in the living room wonder aloud why Cole Palmer didn’t simply flick the ball over Cucurella’s head using his silver Trickster PlayStyle before bending a fine shot from 40 yards out in the Euro 2024 final+.
But while PlayStyles has done a great job of giving each player more personality, they’ve also pushed FC 24 in another “unrealistic” direction – even more individualistic in what’s supposed to be a team sport. This in turn makes the game’s inadequacies in representing an entire 11vs11 football match all the more stark, when the unstoppable force of Quickstep+ and technical dribbling Ronaldinho seemed to crush the immovable object known as Virgil van Dijk until a latency spike or a lapse in concentration determined the outcome.
This balance of exciting end-to-end skill and realism is the key battle for EA Sports FC 25, but it’s not as simple as returning the game to basics.
“We’re a simulation, but we’re also a game,” explains Sam Rivera, Senior Producer at EA Sports FC. “We always have to find the balance between creating something that’s a full simulation and something that’s more suited to the six-minute half of a game.
“Sometimes we have to make some decisions to prioritise something other than a realistic simulation – but in general, most of the game is a simulation. It depends on the situation, but our goal is not to go away from simulation, but to be as close to football as possible, but our game requires compromises.”
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One of the systems designed to recreate the realism of FC 25 is what EA calls “FC IQ”, a redesign of its underlying tactical engine that incorporates new, more modern player roles and positions. Now, instead of vaguely telling a striker to “go back”, you can plan your team’s attacking and defensive frameworks in more detail, using activity maps to create combinations on the pitch and (hopefully) develop a more cohesive and cerebral style, rather than sprinting forward as fast as possible and hoping someone ends up in the right position to pull the score back.
FC IQ is particularly noteworthy not only because it delivers a much-needed update to a long-neglected aspect of the gameplay experience, but also because it does so in every mode in FC 25 .
In previous versions, both Career Mode and Pro Clubs felt like they were getting more bland year on year, as both modes fell further behind Ultimate Team in the pecking order as there was a growing feeling that a lack of new features, bugs that still existed between game years, and a lackluster presentation meant they were going to fade away completely. But in FC 25, there seems to be a renewed emphasis on the entire product, with more well-rounded developments and new reasons to pick up each mode.
“A few years ago, it was very easy to add more features to the game, and if something was missing, you would say ‘oh, that’s missing’ and add it. Now it’s much more difficult,” Rivera said.
“As the game rotates year-over-year, it becomes more difficult because the game already has so many features, so now you really need to have a deep understanding of what the gaps are, what the opportunities are, and invest in those opportunities. So over the last few years, we’ve been working hard to understand those opportunities, develop strategies and start realizing those opportunities. I guess that’s the natural path of the series, and you’re starting to see a lot of investment going into the game.
“Every year we strive to make a better game. We have an advanced team that is working on technology for the next two, three, four years. We get community feedback every year and want to meet their expectations. The team grows every year and the game continues to evolve. All of this allows us to create more impactful features. We continue to create a lot of things for the game every year, but I think this year’s features are completely different. We want to create more features that are throughout the entire game, not just the good stuff in Career More or UT.”
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One theory that never faded, however, was that EA Sports was more motivated to improve Career Mode and Pro Clubs, rather than just the lucrative Ultimate Team, in the face of potential competition. While the shell of eFootball continues to pluck out the odd license from EA’s near-monopoly, there are rumours of more serious testing underway from the likes of the Cristiano Ronaldo-backed UFL (which just delayed its launch from September to December 2024) and mega-publisher 2K (which is looking to build on the success of NBA 2K).
Interestingly, these rumors also portray any potential future challengers as both plucky upstarts (albeit with 8 or 9 figure budgets) and soccer masters, capable of dethroning EA in a single cycle with unrivalled gameplay. But given EA’s nearly 30-year head start and the difficulty of developing a smooth match engine from scratch, there’s confidence behind the scenes that FC can fend off the “new manager backlash” that others expect.
“We welcome competition — if there’s competition, that’s great,” Rivera said. “But the key is we want to provide something of value, something you enjoy, something you love: the more the better. We have new experiences every year, more features, more options.”
“What I can tell you is that the secret to making a good football simulation game is that we know, we have, we have a very large community that loves to play this game. We know the game has to be responsive, we know the visuals have to be good, the mechanics have to have enough depth and variety. We know the fundamentals of football need to work well, controlling the ball while running, everything has to work well.
“This is not something that’s going to happen in one year, two years or five years. So we know we have the capability, and we know we need to continue to invest in the core game experience while creating new experiences while making sure that each mode adds value. So that’s what we’re focused on.”
But even if you lead in quality, it will still be hard to crush the competition if your community is ready to give up.
EA Sports FC has seen its community cohesion fray in recent years for a number of reasons, with players protesting hostile celebrations during matches, opponents deliberately negating the progress of others, and an overall overly competitive edge.
Crucially, therefore, this is another cornerstone of the experience that FC 25 aims to improve. Firstly, by giving players a more robust Career Mode to relax in, which takes the pressure off players from the rewards and shop pack-centric Ultimate Team, where Ultimate Team is the only place to play. Also, there is Rush, a new game type (not a game mode) that provides a more casual, community-driven and comfortable environment – giving players a space to relax and enjoy the game, away from the overly competitive and daily reward grind.
“The first step is really working with our community team to understand what players want,” Rivera said of the steps EA is taking to build a more engaged community. “The second step is balancing the experience and making sure we’re providing enough value, enough choice, enough resources to keep you coming back. It’s not a simple process, it’s a comprehensive process.”
“Also, communities will often tell you they want ‘this’ but don’t actually know what that means. So you need to have the experience to know ‘what you want might not be this, but this is it’.”
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EA stresses that Rush has no technical basis with the previous (now shelved) five-a-side football mode VOLTA, so as not to diminish the effort put into designing a small-sided football game played on smaller fields. Likewise, it’s implemented in all game modes, and you can use your newfangled cards in Ultimate Team, your entire youth squad in Career Mode, and three friends in Pro Club.
Finally, EA is also aiming to address its apparent inaction when it comes to responding to player feedback, with the creation of a new dedicated internal team tasked with proactively evaluating and addressing changes – this time within a game cycle, not just between product years.
“For years we’ve had a live team, but recently we formed another team who play the game as end users during regular production cycles and provide a lot of feedback,” Rivera explained. “This team is made up of people who play the game regularly and know a lot about the game, and we just want to get more feedback at all times, not just when the game is live.
“Probably the most crucial part is finding the right solution to this problem. We often hear things like: ‘The pass is too strong’, ‘You can pass the ball without thinking’, but when we actually look at the game, the problem is not the pass, but the interception is too weak.
“Once we identify the problem, it’s up to the producers and designers to load up a test rig and reproduce the case, check with the engineers and animators, and then we can fix the issue. If the fix is just tweaking a variable, then we can fix it without a patch. If the fix requires changing code or making new animations, then that has to be included in a patch.”
Cristiano Ronaldo, Ruud van Nistelrooy and about five legendary Italian strikers have all said, “Goals are like ketchup, when you try, you get nothing unless they all come together” – and the same seems to be true of FC 25’s gameplay features, especially when EA is calling this season’s Career Mode update “the biggest in a decade”.
Much like real-world football, there’s endless discussion about “what’s next,” and EA Sports FC’s plans stretch well into the 2030s.
“I don’t think this is something that happened randomly, we know our goal long term: we want to create the most realistic simulation in terms of gameplay,” Rivera said.
“There are still things we need to think about, we want the game to be super responsive, we want the game to give you as many experiences as possible. We have a long-term strategy for the next five years, where we want to invest not just in features but in the entire offering of the game, including live services, which consoles we support and in which regions. So we have a plan and we build features based on this five-year, in some cases 10-year strategy.”
EA Sports FC 25 will be released on PlayStation, Xbox, PC, and Switch on September 27. For our initial impressions of the game, you can read our hands-on preview .
