2025 is a big year for EA Sports FC, but when isn’t it?

In the ceaseless annual cycle of football that it tries so hard to replicate, EA Sports FC now has to justify itself on two fronts: not just year-on-year, but as a new franchise with a point to prove.

With the inaugural FC 24, EA Sports burst out of the blocks with PlayStyles, one of the most transformative fantasy additions to its core gameplay in many years, giving players footballing superpowers and kicking off a whole new metagame of combinations and strategies.

However, while it was the archetypal ‘back-of-the-box’ feature, it’s also the kind of thing that’s destined to drive more grounded fans to distraction, as their friends in the pub or family in the living room wonder aloud why Cole Palmer didn’t simply use his silver Trickster PlayStyle to flick the ball over Cucurella’s head and bend in a Finesse Shot+ from 40 yards in the Euro 2024 final.

But while PlayStyles did a lot to give individual players more personality, they also pushed FC 24 in another ‘unrealistic’ direction – even further towards the individual in what’s supposed to be a team sport. This, in turn, more starkly exposed the deficiencies in how the game represented an entire match of 11vs11 football, when an unstoppable force made up Quick Step+ and Technical Dribbling Ronaldinhos just seemed to smash against the immovable object known as Virgil van Dijk until a lag spike or lapse in concentration decided the winner.

This balance between exciting end-to-end skills and realism is a key battle for EA Sports FC 25, but it’s not as simple as stripping the game back-to-basics.

“We’re a simulation game, but we’re a game,” Sam Rivera, EA Sports FC senior producer explains. “We always have to balance creating something that is fully a simulation versus something that’s more adaptive to the six-minute halves we have in the game.

“Sometimes there’s decisions we have to make where we prioritise not real simulation – but in general, most of the game is a simulation. It depends on a case-by-case basis, but our goal is not to go away from simulation, but stay as close to football as possible, but again we’re a game that needs to make compromises.”

One of the key systems aimed at redressing the realism in FC 25 is what EA is calling “FC IQ,” a rework of its underlying tactics engine with new, more modern, player roles and positions. Now, rather than nebulously asking a striker to “get in behind,” you can plot your team’s offensive and defensive framework more meticulously, using an activity map to create combinations on the pitch and (hopefully) develop a more cohesive and cerebral style than sprinting forward as quickly as possible and hoping someone ends up in the right place to cut it back to.

FC IQ is particularly notable, not just because it gives a long-neglected aspect of the gameplay experience a much-needed refresh, but because it does so throughout every mode in FC 25.

In previous editions, both Career Mode and Pro Clubs felt flatter and flatter year-on-year, as each mode fell further behind Ultimate Team in the pecking order, as the perception grew that a lack of new features, bugs that persisted between game years and tired presentation meant that they were on the way out altogether. But in FC 25, it seems as if there’s a renewed emphasis on the whole product, with more holistic progression and new reasons to pick up each mode.

“Years ago it was very easy to add more features to the game, if something was missing you’d say ‘oh, that’s missing’ and just add it. Now it’s a lot harder,” Rivera says.

“With the year-on-year rotation, it’s a lot harder because the game already has a lot of features, so now you really need to understand deeply what the gaps are, what the opportunities are and invest in those. So in the last few years there’s been a big push to know those opportunities, create a strategy and start delivering on that. I guess that’s the natural path for the franchise and you’re starting to see a lot of those investments come into the game.

“Every year we try to make a better game. We have an advanced team that is working on technologies for the next two, three, four years. We have community feedback with expectations we want to meet every year. The team is getting larger every year and the game is growing. That all together allows us to create more impactful features. We’ll continue to create a lot of things every single year for the game, but I think this year the features are quite different. We wanted to create more features that go across the entire game, not just something that’s good in Career More or UT. “

However, one theory that refuses to go away is that EA Sports is more motivated to improve Career Mode and Pro Clubs – not just the lucrative Ultimate Team – in the face of prospective competition. While the husk of eFootball continues to peel the odd licence away from EA’s near monopoly, rumours that more serious tests from the likes of the Cristiano Ronaldo-backed UFL (which just delayed its launch from September to December 2024) and mega-publisher 2K (looking to build on its success with NBA 2K) are hotting up.

Interestingly, these rumours also portray any potential future challengers simultaneously as plucky upstarts (despite mooted 8 or 9 figure budgets) and football maestros, capable of toppling EA in a single cycle with unmatched gameplay. But given EA’s nearly 30-year head start and the difficulty of developing a fluid match engine from scratch, there’s confidence behind the scenes that FC can fend off the ‘new manager bounce’ others are looking for.

“We welcome competition – if there’s competition, that’s great,” Rivera states. “But the key here is we want to offer value, things that you enjoy, things that you like: the more the better. We have new experiences every year, more features, more options.

“What I can tell you is the formula for creating a good football simulation game, we know it, we have it, we have a very large community who enjoy playing the game. We know that the game has to be responsive, we know that the visuals have to be good, there has to be enough depth and variety in the mechanics. We know that the fundamentals of football need to work well, controlling the ball while you’re running, everything has to work well.

“That doesn’t happen in one year, two years or in five years. So we know we have that, we know we need to continue investing in that core gameplay experience while creating new experiences, while we make sure that every mode adds value. So that’s what we focus on.”

But, even with this head start on quality, it’s still difficult to squash competition if your community is ready to jump ship.

For a host of reasons, EA Sports FC has seen its community cohesion wane in recent years, with players protesting about toxic matches with antagonistic celebrations, opponents deliberately denying others’ progress and an over-competitive edge in general.

So crucially, this is another cornerstone of the experience that FC 25 aims to improve. First by giving players a stronger Career Mode to unwind in, which relieves the pressure on the reward and store pack-focused Ultimate Team as the only place to play. But also with Rush, a new game-type (not game mode) that offers a more casual, community-driven and cosy setting – giving players a space to relax and enjoy the game away from the over-the-top hyper-competition and daily rewards grind.

“The first one is literally with our community team and understanding what players want,” Rivera says of the steps EA is taking to form a more positive community. “The second step is balancing the experience to make sure we provide enough value, enough options, enough resources for you to come back. It’s not a simple process but a combination of things.

“And also, often, the community will tell you they want ‘this’ without really knowing what that means. So you need to have experience of knowing ‘what you want is maybe not this but it’s this’.”

EA is keen to stress that Rush shares no technical underpinning with the previous (and now shelved) five-a-side mode, VOLTA, lest it undercut the effort that’s gone into designing the small-sided game which takes place on a smaller pitch. Again, it’s implemented across all game modes, where you can play with your fancy new cards in Ultimate Team, your whole Youth Squad in Career Mode, and 3 friends in Pro Clubs.

Then finally, EA is also aiming to address its perceived inaction when responding to player feedback too, with a new dedicated internal team tasked with proactively assessing and tackling changes – this time within a game’s cycle, not just between product years.

“For many years we’ve had a live team, but recentlyc we’ve built another team who play the game as an end user during the regular production cycle and provide a lot of feedback,” Rivera explains. “This group is made up of people who play the game a lot and know a lot about the game, we just want more feedback all the time and not only when the game goes live.

“Probably the most crucial part is creating the right solution for that problem. Very often we hear something like ‘passing is overpowered’, ‘you can pass without thinking’, but when we actually look at the game, passing wasn’t the problem, it was that interceptions were too weak.

“Once we identified that, which requires producers and designers loading the test bed and reproducing the cases and checking with engineers and animators, then we have a fix. If the fix is just tuning variables, then we can do it without a patch. If the fix requires code changes or new animations, then it has to be included with a patch.”

In a quote that’s been attributed to Cristiano Ronaldo, Ruud van Nistelrooy, and about 5 legendary Italian strikers, ‘goals are like ketchup, when you try you get nothing until they all come at once’ – and with FC 25 it can seem that way with gameplay features too, particularly when EA refers to this season’s Career Mode update as the “biggest in a decade”.

Just like with real-world football, the endless conversation is always about ‘what’s next’, and plans for EA Sports FC already stretch into the 2030s.

“I don’t think it’s something that’s randomly happening, we know where we want to go for the long term: we want to create the most authentic simulation in terms of gameplay,” Rivera says.

“There are still things we need to look at, we want the game to be super responsive, we want the game to offer you as many experiences as possible. We have a long-term strategy for the next 5 years, where we want to invest and it’s not just the features but the offering of the game as a whole, in terms of live services and what consoles we support and in what regions. So we have a plan and we build features on that 5 year, 10 year in some cases, strategy.”

EA Sports FC 25 is set to release on September 27th for PlayStation, Xbox, PC and Switch. For more on our initial impressions of the game, you can read our hands-on preview.