"Imagine if you could play with young Messi" The biggest update to Career Mode in years is exactly what EA Sports FC 25 needs

Even as Ultimate Team in EA Sports FC 25 seems to be making strides towards becoming less frustrating with Duplicate Storage, more casual Friendlies, and stronger rewards, it also continues to get increasingly monetised - this year with a paid premium season pass on top of its packs.

I’ve played Manager Career Mode for almost as long as I can remember, but as the mode has fossilised in recent editions - with bugs that persisted between games and a lack of meaningful gameplay features - I’ve found myself gravitating towards the online modes more out of necessity than choice.

At a recent preview event for EA Sports FC 25, EA spoke a lot about creating more social spaces and less intense competition in their latest football game, but really, I think the best way to relieve pressure in FC 25 would be to have a viable alternative to UT in the form of a satisfying, realistic and compelling Career Mode.

It’s exciting then, looking down the list of key new features in FC 25, that Career Mode seems to be the biggest winner.

First, FC IQ is a massive overhaul of the tactics engine that underpins FC’s gameplay which does away with the outdated and woolly “get in behind” and “stay back while attacking” instructions, the inscrutable high, medium and low work rates and even some base positions like RWB, LWB and CF.

“FCIQ is a general thing for FC, but also a really good fit for Career Mode,” says Andreas Wilsdorf, a producer on Career Mode.

“I feel just with everything we’re bringing to the game, be it customisation, playable Women’s Career Mode, playable youth teams - which has never been done in a football game - it feels like a really meaningful update, while at the same time bringing in community feedback with more countries to scout in, the social media system, the new UI, letting them create the game they want.”

FC IQ replaces the old backend systems with a host of new Player Roles, which you set on an Activity Map that displays the fluid motion of your players on the pitch.

As well as instantly recognisable roles like Deep Lying Playmaker and Wing Back, there are also more modern and complicated tactical plans you can implement, with EA using the examples of “False-Back” where a player notionally starts at full-back but moves inside into midfield while you have possession like Oleksandr Zinchenko for Arsenal or Trent Alexander-Arnold for Liverpool, and “Half-winger” where a CM with high crossing pushes out wide to whip the ball in like Kevin De Bruyne for Man City.

While it remains to be seen just how transformational these updated tactics are across a full season of gameplay, Career Mode has been crying out for greater variety for many years, with both your own squad and the AI teams you face feeling one-paced throughout samey matches.

Player Roles aim to add a much-needed layer of tactical flexibility to FC 25 which was starting to look seriously dated compared to more sophisticated sims like Football Manager, and they already seem less static than the tactics you could employ across FIFA and FC 24.

“I think you can’t underestimate the impact that FC IQ will have on the pitch,” says Paul Parsons, a lead producer for gameplay on EA Sports FC. “The movement of players is something that matters so much to the gameplay, more so than just the moment to moment - where is somebody when is the key to success. I think that when you look at that feature, your interaction with it tends to be menu-based but then when you’re on the field it does carry over on a 1-to-1 basis.”

“And you’ll see if you play a match and you look at the heat maps after a game, it has a very real impact. We do have the other features, professional fouls, new Playstyles, things like that, which add to the base gameplay.”

However, not all players can just waltz into any role and play it perfectly. Every player has one “+” Role that they’re familiar with, whereas world-class players can have “++” Roles as well. This means they’re naturally excellent at their assigned job and will make better timed runs and control their space more effectively.

In Career Mode, you have the added ability to be able to coach players in different Roles, or increase their familiarity with their current Roles, so hopefully there will a better sense of progression and evolution in tactical sets ups - whereas before you likely just set it up once and played for as many seasons as held your interest.

AI managers apparently use these more varied tactics too, and there’s supposed to be dynamic AI behavior which means you’re not playing against the exact same gameplans over and over.

“So you’ve got the Roles where you can develop and change from players from a False 9 to a Poacher and that takes weeks or months depending on how good the stats are,” Pete O’Donnel, Lead Designer on Career Mode, explains. “But then you’ve got the coaches, or you could go into transfers, so we want to give players options. Maybe you want to do the coaching route, or change my tactics to fit the most important players. So there are lots of choices and that’s what we want to get across.

“It’s about min-maxing. If you don’t fiddle about too much, you’re not going to go too far wrong. But if you do fiddle about that’s when you’re going to be able to hire coaches to improve, change development plans and really start to grow, see those green pluses appear - but if you don’t have those green pluses, they’re still doing it, it’s okay, but we wanted them to be better, make better timed runs, that sort of thing.”

Another area where Career Mode literally looked dated was the visuals. There’s a reason why the community prized youth prospects with real face scans over almost anything else - the generic player models simply didn’t lend themselves to an immersive experience. But for FC 25, EA is introducing “Cranium”, a refresh of how players without a facescan are represented in-game, with a much better likeness as the target.

As someone who supports a team outside of the “top 5 leagues”, having a team of generic players was one of the most jarring aspects of Career Mode, particularly once you eventually did reach the upper echelons and started to mix the realistic-looking scanned players into your team, so Cranium is a very welcome addition - particularly since it’s been applied to Youth Squad players too.

“We looked into the feedback for FC 24 and you can see it from the updates we’re making to youth for example,” Wilsdorf says. “A famous one that we know is ‘why does my 14 year old player have a full beard?’ Everything we’ve read, we’re trying to fix - definitely.

“The thing I love about the Career Mode community is, like football fans themselves, they’re really passionate. They’re very outspoken in a positive way and hold us accountable for where we want the mode to be. We’re completely honest that not every year the updates were what they could have been. I think the thing we really wanted to show this year is that we care about Career Mode. Career Mode is really important to us and I hope it comes through.

But finally, Career Mode is also a big beneficiary from the new 5-a-side game type that’s replacing VOLTA: Rush. Rush is a short-sided game type played on a smaller pitch where offsides start in the attacking third and bad fouls are punished with a “blue card” sin bin.

You can play Rush with your friends in Ultimate Team or Pro Clubs, but in Career Mode, you can enter Rush tournaments with your Youth Squad at set points throughout a season, playing either with their current overall to gauge their ability or using the youth player’s full potential to simulate their prowess in youth football - kind of like how Erling Haaland scored 9 goals for Norway U-20 that time.

Not only does this sound like a better way to mix-up the mid-season slog than international management, but it also sees to introducing more interactivity with Youth Squads and developing your own players - a much-loved aspect of Career Mode and a perennially requested new feature.

“Rush is a whole new experience when you play the game,” says Kantcho Doskov, game design director for gameplay. “Even myself, I’ve played FC and FIFA for many years but when I play Rush I’m like ‘woah, this is different’, right? You’re playing with your friends and you’re controlling your avatar, but you’re always in the action. It’s not like traditional Clubs where you can go several minutes without touching the ball, you’re always on, you’re always close to the ball or defending the ball, it’s so much more engaging.”

“With Rush the opportunity came to think, ‘what can we do there’?” says Wilsdorf. “Imagine if you could play with young Messi - that’s where we were in the brainstorm with all of this - and thought let’s do something with youth that’s never been done before. On the one hand it’s about opportunity and the other it’s about getting things right.”

Outside of those core additions, Career Mode is also getting a few specific new ways to play, including a fully integrated women’s Career Mode with its own transfer market, player careers with Icons like Pirlo, Beckham and R9 (if you pre-order, boo), and “Live Start Points” which is a new feature when you can pick up a real life season from where it’s at in real life.

At first I wasn’t sure how big of a deal this was, but then I thought back to all the times I’d started a save with a cool team doing well in the Champion’s League only to have the ‘wrong teams’ go through or have it play out differently to how I wanted, so it’s a nice touch.

However, the takeaway from what we’ve seen of EA Sports FC 25 so far is that there’s a renewed emphasis on Career Mode as a viable option, finally, and that can only be a good thing for the franchise.