Game intel
EA Sports FC 26
The Club is Yours in EA SPORTS FC 26. Play your way with an overhauled gameplay experience powered by community feedback, Manager Live Challenges that bring fr…
I came into EA Sports FC 26 on PlayStation 5 expecting a refinement year. Last season’s FC 25 felt like a course correction-tighter passing, cleaner ball physics, a career mode that finally remembered it’s supposed to be a football universe, not a menu maze. FC 26 doesn’t blow up that foundation. Instead, after 15 hours of bouncing between Career, Ultimate Team, and Clubs, it nudges the series toward realism with a few smart additions-and then whiffs a couple of open nets, mainly around defending and keepers. It’s the most “two steps forward, one step back” entry I’ve played in a while.
For context: I played on PS5, Performance mode, DualSense on default haptics, Competitive Controller Settings for online, and Realistic gameplay preset for offline Career. I’m a pass-first player-R1+Cross to zip a driven pass, L1 for player runs, and I live for those Triangle-through-ball splits. I toggled Time Finishing back on after two hours because the new shot animations feel different enough that the green-timing window matters again.
By the end of night one (about 4 hours in), I’d already felt something FC Career has missed for years: resistance. The new manager market means your coach isn’t just a nameplate—he has a reputation and realistic limits. I started at a mid-table Ligue 1 club and tried to peek at Premier League openings like a nosy neighbor. The game slapped my hand. “Not feasible,” the board said, and the shortlist of plausible gigs made sense. It sounds small, but that grounded the whole save. I wasn’t hopping jobs like a FIFA-era demigod.
Manager Live is the headline tweak and it’s clever. Rather than a sandbox, it’s a set of scenario challenges built on real starting points—“secure Champions League qualification,” “pull off the treble,” that kind of spice. The catch, and it’s a weird one: not every league has every team available. In France’s top flight, I could only pick PSG. I wanted a gritty Marseille rebuild, but the mode shut the door. The structure is great for bite-sized drama, and those real-world starting forms from last year still add credibility, but the team restriction is a buzzkill. Let me crash and burn with whoever I want.
The unexpected events system is the real MVP here. Around hour 7, my board suddenly cut our transfer budget by 20% due to “commercial performance shortfall.” I actually stared at the screen for a beat. Later, a training-ground knock to my left-back triggered an emergency loanee search, and one of my young wingers got called out in the dressing room for tardiness. None of it felt spammy or punitive. It asked me to react like a manager instead of hoarding wonderkids and simming to glory. If Football Manager is the rabbit hole of spreadsheets, FC 26’s Career finally gives you just enough chaos to feel alive without drowning you.
The rest of Career’s spine is familiar. Some new cutscenes add pre-match texture, transfers have a bit more negotiation granularity, but the interface is largely the same—functional, faintly dusty. I don’t mind the stability, but I hoped for a touch more freshness in the day-to-day loop. It’s one of those “good problem to have” things: the mode is already strong, and these tweaks push it into “yeah, one more season” territory, but the presentation could still use a spring clean.
I usually bounce off Player Career after a few nights because it can feel like doing the same homework every match. The new archetypes changed that for me this year. I rolled a left-footed striker and picked the Finisher archetype, then switched to Magician for a second save as a drifting 10. The difference is immediate. With Finisher, my off-the-ball runs are sharper and the first touch sets up that quick, green-window near-post blast. With Magician, it’s the body feints, the disguised passes, and the dribble chain feeling more fluid. By hour 12, I’d shaped my forward into a penalty-box menace with a secondary aerial trait, and the identity “stuck” match to match.
There are new “origin stories” like Rising Star and Golden Hand that tweak the narrative framing and early expectations. The personality meter remains intact—those dialog-ish choices that grant small attribute boosts depending on whether you’re a Maverick or a Heartbeat. It’s not a revolution, but the archetype layer gives the mode the kind of flavor it’s been missing. I actually looked forward to training because the boosts mattered to my build, not just my OVR number.
I spent roughly 5 hours in Ultimate Team, which is enough to feel the new Rivals checkpoint system doing work. Divisions still stratify players, but the soft checkpoints keep you from yo-yoing so hard you want to uninstall. After a two-loss spiral, I didn’t drop into oblivion; I stabilized, grabbed some FC Points and credits, and clawed forward. It’s a small tweak with a massive psychological effect—progress feels earned rather than brittle.
Live tournament events are back and way spicier than I expected. You queue in during the window, you play a knockout, and each win pairs you with someone at the same stage. On Saturday night, I made a mini-run to the quarterfinals and could feel my pulse in my thumbs. Single-elim football exposes your principles: I tightened up, went narrow, spammed quick triangles and tried to time finish from the D. Won one on pens, lost the next to a 90+2 rebound. It’s the kind of tension I want from Ultimate Team without needing to wade into a full weekend grind.
The rest of UT is the known loop: cards, SBCs, upgrade bait. The microtransactions are still here on a premium game, and that’ll always rub me the wrong way. You can earn packs through play and objectives—and I did, steadily—but the shop is never out of the corner of your eye. If that’s a dealbreaker for you, nothing in FC 26 changes your mind.
Clubs gets small but meaningful quality-of-life upgrades. You can finally create multiple clubs and swap between them depending on your friend group, which is a blessing for those of us juggling work friends and our “we take this too seriously” weekend crew. Archetypes carry over here too, which makes role definition easier when you’re filling out a 5-3-2. Rush playlists and live events add some rotation, and while the league structure itself hasn’t evolved much, those little injections kept us logging back in after midnight.
FC 26 basically admits it’s juggling two audiences and decides to serve both. The Competitive preset is quicker, more direct, and more automated on passes and shots. It’s the online meta in a bottle. Build-up feels slick—you can whip a 1-2-1 triangle, hit R1+Cross for a zippy driven pass, and you’ll often carve right through. But there’s a side effect: goal avalanches. In Division Rivals and Clubs, I saw 5-4 and 7-3 scorelines more than I’d like. Defensive AI doesn’t bail you out, rebounds still tilt a bit lucky (less than last year, but enough to sigh), and keepers are coin flips in one-on-ones. The rush is real; so is the chaos.
The Realistic preset is slower, weightier, and honestly more enjoyable offline. Ball physics remain the star. Driven crosses have that skim, outside-of-the-boot through balls carry just enough curl to tempt a defender into stabbing the wrong lane, and shoulder-to-shoulder duels finally look like something you’d see in Ligue 1 on a rainy Sunday. New animations help. You feel the extra touches in tight spaces, and dribbling chains are less likely to rubber-band you into a defender’s shin. When the keepers decide they’re world-class, the fingertip saves are gorgeous. When they don’t, they spill a waist-high daisy cutter straight into a striker’s lap. That inconsistency—still—yanks me out of the immersion.
Defending, across both presets, is the game’s thorniest problem. I switched between Jockey on L2, conservative contain, and the occasional second-man press on R1. I manually tracked runs with the right stick player switch and still conceded cheap cutbacks because the back line’s shape snaps weirdly in the box. You can learn it—by hour 10, I’d improved—yet it feels like I’m fighting rules of engagement that are a patch behind the rest of the engine. If next year has a single design mandate, please let it be “revamp defending.”
And while we’re here: playing as the goalkeeper is still more frustration than fun. There’s a newish interface dressing, and you can hop in as GK in Rush now, but timing saves on corners or judging near-post rockets never clicked. I ate two identical goals at the same near post because the animation queued late. I want keeper to feel like a skill expression role; right now, it’s a slot machine with gloves.
On PS5, Performance mode ran at a steady 60fps in matches. Replays still drop frames here and there, and some cutscene cinematics feel 30-ish, but on-pitch responsiveness never cratered. The DualSense is put to good use—the subtle rumble when a defender leans on your back, the adaptive trigger resistance as your winger gasses out on R2, that light tap when you ping a clean long pass. I dialed haptics down a notch because the default can be a touch busy, but it adds to the illusion of weight.
Visually, it’s familiar—crisp kits, decent face scans for star players, variable quality once you drop down the squad list. Night matches in the rain still look fantastic with the slick surface reflections, and grass wear shows up convincingly in the center circle late in matches. Commentary is adequate, crowds get loud in big moments, and the new “TV-style” angles in select cutscenes are nice flourishes even if you’ve seen the trick before.
Online, my Rivals sessions were stable with the occasional hiccup. I had one stutter in a live tournament that froze for a second before resuming, which is nightmare fuel in a knockout, but it didn’t decide the outcome. Matchmaking felt fairer in the early divisions thanks to checkpoints; smurfs still exist, but the treadmill is less punishing.
Licensing remains “good enough” rather than exhaustive. You get the heavy hitters—Premier League, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Serie A representation with the usual caveats around certain Italian club names and kits—and national teams feel barebones. Women’s teams exist but aren’t meaningfully integrated beyond the expected offerings. It’s the reality of life post-FIFA branding: plenty to play, but the edges fray if you’re looking for total authenticity everywhere.
Three sequences stuck with me and shifted my read on FC 26:
1) Around hour 6 in Manager Live, tasked with nicking a top-four finish, I lost my best center-back to a two-week training knock two days before a six-pointer. I reshuffled to a back three, parked my more agile CB central to sweep, and stole a 1-0 with 39% possession. It felt earned, not scripted, because the event forced me into a pragmatic plan.
2) In Ultimate Team, I green-timed a 25-yard curler with my untradeable lefty and watched it wobble with that sweet outside bend. That’s the ball physics magic I play FC for. Minutes later, my keeper volleyed a speculative cross into the striker’s chest for the equalizer. That’s the keepers I complain about. The truth of FC 26 lives between those two plays.
3) In Clubs, swapping between two different squads in the same night—one sweaty, one chaotic—was seamless thanks to multi-club support. Our sweats team ran a rigid 4-2-2-2 with a Finisher and a Magician at CAM; the vibes team threw on five at the back and long-balled it to a 6’4″ Target archetype. Both sessions felt distinct and we didn’t have to dismantle builds to accommodate them.
Works:
– Career’s manager market and unexpected events add friction and flavor without clutter.
– Archetypes in Pro Career and Clubs give players an identity that shows up every match.
– Rivals checkpoints and live tournaments make Ultimate Team feel less punishing and more thrilling.
– Ball physics and new animations elevate the “feel” of football in both presets.
Needs work:
– Defending fundamentals. Positioning, box shape, and second balls still frustrate.
– Goalkeeper consistency, especially in one-on-ones and corner chaos.
– Manager Live’s team availability. Let us pick more clubs for scenarios.
– Presentation refresh. Career menus and cutscenes could use modern polish.
FC 26 is the best the post-FIFA series has felt to me in the moment-to-moment—those little touches, the new animations, the way a driven pass whistles into feet and sets up a perfect layoff. Career finally puts bumps in your path that aren’t just transfer budget caps. Pro Career and Clubs benefit massively from archetypes, giving every created player a soul. Ultimate Team feels fairer on weekdays and thrilling on event nights.
Yet the same old gremlins haunt the box. Defending is good enough to master but never satisfying to trust. Keepers can turn a clean-sheet into a blooper reel. Manager Live’s odd team limitations pull you out of the fantasy. Licensing is fine, not fantastic. If EA can lock down the defensive model and goalkeeping logic next year, we might be talking best-in-class across the board.
As it stands, after 15 hours, I’m impressed and annoyed in equal measure—and I can’t stop queuing for “one more” match. That tells you most of what you need to know.
Score: 8/10
Get access to exclusive strategies, hidden tips, and pro-level insights that we don't share publicly.
Ultimate Reviews Strategy Guide + Weekly Pro Tips