Greet the new dawn, bub! For the first time in 30 years, EA Sports’ flagship football franchise kicks off a new season without the Fifa endorsement that had contributed not just to the videogame’s title, but also its identity.
As such, ‘FC’ (as the publisher perhaps optimistically hopes it will come to be known by fans) arrives burdened with expectation – much of which is self-inflicted. Back in June, the game’s VP of Brand, David Jackson, promised Telegraph Sport, “it will become very clear, very quickly, that this is… genuinely something new, and genuinely something emergent and nascent from a new brand”.
It transpires Jackson was about half right: FC feels more like a re-brand than a revolution; a marketing drill rather than a football one. Sure there’s a host of tactical tweaks and incremental improvements across the piece, and the user interface has been given a long-overdue overhaul, but at heart this is very much the Fifa experience fans will be familiar with.
Last year’s core gameplay modes are all present and correct, albeit with a number of embellishments designed to more realistically reflect the modern game – for good and ill. The mode in which you steer the career of an individual footballer will now allow you to hire an agent, for example. Manager Mode, meanwhile, adds more emphasis to tactics and training than before, and allows proto-Pep Guardiolas to hire their own backroom staff – although it should probably go without saying that Football Manager this ain’t.
On the pitch, the quest for realism manifests itself in Playstyles, a suite of Opta-derived abilities assigned to individual players to better mimic their real-world attributes. Virgil van Dijk and Ruben Dias are now monsters in the air, while Vinicius Jr and Rafael Leao are speed dribblers extraordinaire. It’s a neat mechanic which, when combined with the yearly animation and physics upgrades, truly helps bring FC’s virtual stars to life. On the whole, the gameplay feels pretty good right now – although seasoned players know the real test comes in the winter, once the inevitable slew of post-releases patches have moved the goalposts.
Perhaps the biggest innovation here is also the most controversial. Making good on their ‘The world’s game’ tagline and pre-release promise that this would be their most inclusive iteration yet, EA Sports have now extended their integration of women’s football to Ultimate Team, the series’ most popular – and lucrative – mode which sees gamers collectively spending billions of real-world pounds buying virtual Panini-like packs of players to assemble the best teams possible.
Inevitably the ‘go woke, go broke’ crowd are already up-in-arms because top female stars like Alexia Putellas and Sam Kerr can not only play in the same teams as the men, but also have similar in-game ratings and statistics to Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland.
Their complaints are largely facile, of course. For years Ultimate Team has allowed deceased historical icons like Bobby Moore and Eusebio to line-up with modern players, so it seems redundant to play the realism card now. Furthermore, the introduction of these new players into Ultimate Team’s gene pool has freshened up the mode no end – particularly given how the smaller, more agile women genuinely feel different to control.
It’s also one of the few discernible ‘divorce dividends’ from EA Sports’ split with Fifa given the organisational body were reportedly reluctant to promote the mixing of male and female teams (the only other being an in-game commercial tie-in with previously verboten partner Nike, unless Fifa were also really proscriptive about the fonts used in the in-game menus).
Despite the pre-match bluster, perhaps this evolutionary approach was inevitable, and it will take time for EA Sports to forge a new destiny. As it currently stands, the moment in football history FC’s launch resembles most is the inception of the Premier League – right down to the multi-club line-up image used in the pre-launch marketing campaign.
Back in 1992, the Football Association, aided and abetted by Sky Sports, ostentatiously repackaged an already much-loved product in a bid to convince fans it was something shiny and new. And yet, beneath the glitzy broadcast graphics, novel kick-off times, and over-enthusiastic cheerleading squads, fans still spent their weekends watching the likes of Geoff Thomas and Ian Woan huffing and puffing around the same pitches as before.
Of course, the Premier League ultimately ended up doing rather well out of its re-branding exercise. One suspects EA Sports might do so too.
EA Sports FC is released on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC platforms on September 29
