EA Sports FC 25 preview: new tactics, dirty fouls and the best career mode ever

I don’t know about you, but when it comes to EA’s flagship soccer series, I’ve always been more of a Career Mode person than an Ultimate Team person. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve endured my fair share of humblings at the hands of Griddy-happy 12-year-olds (curse you TikTok!), but suffice it to say the novelty of luminous pink FUT player cards wore off a long time ago.

Career Mode, for all its faults, remains the experience of choice for players who value authenticity over arcade-style fun, and the slew of realism-focused upgrades coming to EA Sports FC 25 could make this year’s edition of the annual soccer sim a must-buy for my fellow offline gamers.

I went hands-on with EA Sports FC 25 ahead of its September 20 release, and below, I’ve rounded up my favorite new gameplay features – from deliberate fouls and player slips to EA’s redesigned tactics system.

FC IQ

FC IQ is the umbrella term for what EA is describing as the "most significant change to tactics in over a decade". Essentially, you’ll be given far more control over how your team plays as a unit, and all-new Player Roles – which are determined by real-world data – will see individual players granted the freedom to operate outside of their traditional positions.

The aim of the game here is to reflect the more fluid (i.e. non-traditional) tactical approaches taken by real-world managers like Pep Guardiola and Carlo Ancelotti. You can now have your team alternate between preset formations on the fly – switching between a 4-3-3 and a 4-2-3-1, for instance – while in-game tactical suggestions will suggest tactical tweaks based on the current match situation.

Of course, gamers are not football managers, so the extent to which FC 25 players make use of these new (and complex) tactical tools remains to be seen, but it’s good to see EA making such an effort with a previously disregarded aspect of the FIFA experience.

The redesigned Player Roles system is, mercifully, a lot more accessible. You can now create and allocate hybrid player positions like the inverted fullback, deep-lying midfielder and attacking wingback, which should make versatile players like Bernardo Silva and Antoine Griezmann much more effective than they have been in previous entries. These new player roles will be integrated into Ultimate Team, too.

Dedicated Career Mode upgrades

Career Mode has always been about letting players live out their managerial fantasies, and in FC 25 , EA is blending the real and virtual footballing worlds in a whole new way.

Live Start Points will let you dive into real-world club situations as they happen throughout the season. If, say, Enzo Maresca gets sacked as Chelsea manager in January, or Erling Haaland gets a season-ending injury in November, you’ll be able to jump into a new career save and steer the ship from that point on. EA says these key "Snapshots" could include relegation battles, mid-season transfers and shock manager departures, and they’ll apply to player mode as well as manager mode.

Real-world season stats, league positioning, team form and player injuries will all be replicated in-game if you choose to play from one of these Live Start Points, so this year’s Career Mode will be, quite literally, the most realistic ever.

Other career mode upgrades include the addition of women’s football and the ability to develop your youth team in regular five-a-side tournaments. Neat!

Small but mighty gameplay changes

Every new EA Sports game brings minor gameplay changes to the table, and EA Sports FC 25 is no different. This year, though, the upgrades are decidedly more fun than usual.

For starters, you can deliberately foul players in FC 25 by holding RB + A/X. Of course, it’s technically been possible to maliciously slide tackle players since, well, the first-ever FIFA game in 1994, but until now, you’ve never been able to purposely bring a player down by holding their shirt. You’ll get an instant yellow card for doing so, but tactical fouls are commonplace in today’s real-world game, so it’s good to see EA adding this option in FC 25 .

Players can also now slip over in FC 25 , which adds another variable to gameplay that really should have been included a long time ago. In my short time hands-on session, I only had two of my players slip over – both times during a wet matchday – and neither instance affected the trajectory of my pass. I’m not sure if these slips can happen off the ball, Steven Gerrard-style, but I doubt that EA would implement a potentially game-changing mechanic that players can’t influence themselves. Then again, football is unpredictable!

Finally, for the football purists, FC 25 reintroduces the ability to ‘queue’ a full matchday intro, rather than having the game automatically skip the broadcast formalities in favor of that strange highlights montage from EA Sports FC 24 . I understand that most players want to get straight into the action, but I’m glad we'll now once again have the option to sit through the team walkouts and team sheet animations. If only we could get Martin Tyler back, too...

EA Sports FC 25 is available to pre-order now . The game is scheduled to release on September 20 on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC.

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