EA Sports FC 26 hands-on preview – a bigger change than you think

The latest iteration of EA’s all-conquering football franchise has been extensively tweaked to make it lighter and more responsive.

Whatever your opinions about EA Sports FC – the franchise formerly known as FIFA – you must surely agree that it’s a global phenomenon. In keeping with football’s status as the world’s favourite sport, FC is the world’s most popular sports game and, commensurately, a vast money-earner for Electronic Arts.

However, last year’s FC 25, the second iteration since EA renounced the official FIFA licence, didn’t go down particularly well with fans. EA’s reaction to this has been decisive and extensive, with a bewildering number of changes for this year’s FC 26.

EA claims these changes were led by in-depth consultations with the franchise’s vast community and while it’s easy to be cynical – FC is the company’s most lucrative franchise, so anything that threatens its cash cow status needs to be nipped in the bud – actually playing the game shows they have made a genuine effort to shake things up.

We were able to get hands-on experience with FC 26 in the form of an early beta version of the game on PlayStation 5. Essentially, it consisted of just the Kick-Off quick game mode, allowing us to play men’s and women’s one-off Champions League games, and Rush, the franchise’s five-a-side nod to street football. So all the most popular modes – Career, Clubs, and Ultimate Team – were unavailable.

What we played was essentially a tech demo, but in this instance, one that was worth examining, since it included a large number of the fundamental gameplay changes that EA has made to FC 26. These, EA claims, are a result of community feedback, where FC 25 players felt the gameplay was too ponderous when running and changing direction; that goalkeepers too often palmed the ball to opposition strikers; that defenders’ positioning could be erratic; and that, in general, the pace of the game had become too slow, especially compared to older FIFA games.

We were able to check out EA’s first fix for such criticisms: the presence of two different game tunings, entitled Competitive and Authentic. The Competitive tuning, enabled by default for the online modes, is designed to provide the fast-paced, end-to-end footballing experience for which FIFA games of yore were renowned. Authentic is supposed to provide more of a facsimile of real-life football, with a slower pace, more emphasis on tactical play, and players who will become fatigued in the course of a match.

Select Authentic and it feels like you’re playing an old Pro Evolution Soccer game, while Competitive feels like FIFA turned up to the max, with games that progress swiftly from end to end, providing much more consistent excitement and spectacle than the real-life Premier League and Football League do.

Frankly, the inclusion of the Authentic tuning seemed odd – a sop, perhaps, to those who used to play PES. We certainly had much more fun in Competitive mode, regardless of whether what we were playing resembled real-life football or not, and the vast majority of FC 26 players will almost certainly just stick the game in Competitive mode and leave it there.

Playing in Authentic mode, however, did highlight one piece of good news about FC 26: EA’s mooted changes to the game’s fundamentals, to make the players feel lighter on their feet and more responsive, have most definitely worked, even when dialled down to induce slower-paced games.

These changes are particularly noticeable in Competitive mode: long dribbles are much easier to sustain than in FC 25, first touches from players feel more controllable, and jockeying between players fighting for the ball feels more realistic. Noticeably, the game’s fatigue system – perhaps too much to the fore in FC 25 – has been removed.

Goalkeepers are also much better than in FC 25. Here, they tend to palm the ball away from inrushing forwards, rather than onto their feet at the edge of the six yard box. Another welcome return was the ability to select a low-driven shot when in on goal, by double-tapping the shoot button, sending the ball in along the ground but with plenty of power, thereby eliminating the danger of ballooning your shot over the bar after holding the shoot button down for too long.

When EA first revealed how many fundamental gameplay changes it had made to FC 26, we worried that its slash-and-burn approach could end up introducing new gameplay anomalies. But none were discernible in the cut-down beta version we played. Gameplay-wise, FC 26 already feels solid and, most importantly, like a proper EA Sports football game: fast, slick, and exciting, which marks FC 26 out as a vast improvement over FC 25.

Beyond FC 26’s core gameplay, EA has also made a vast number of tweaks and improvements to the game’s structure, again in response to community feedback. Given that we were only able to play an abridged version of the game, we can’t testify as to whether those tweaks and changes will actually improve the game. But we can at least make you aware of them.

In FC 26, the headline addition to Career mode is the presence of a new way to play a Manager Career, entitled Manager Live. Essentially, it adds a lot of challenges, which are supposed to mirror the soap opera-like nature of real-life football – you might, for example, have to play a chunk of games with your youth team. As the Live nomenclature suggests, new challenges will be introduced on an ongoing basis, like a live service game.

Manager Career in FC 26 will also include unexpected events, which could be as wacky as being hit with a bout of food poisoning in the dressing room, or weathering the pressure of having a documentary filmed about your team. EA has made a number of changes to Manager Career, which are designed to mirror the unpredictability of real-life football, which is certainly a laudable aim. Although the addition of what EA calls Icons and Heroes – basically iconic footballers from yesteryear – will add an extra fantasy dimension.

In Player Career, the main new addition is the concept of Player Archetypes. Archetypes are essentially a fancily-named player development system, which, EA says, ‘offers a more personalised and strategic approach to player development, enabling you to shape your identity on the pitch.’ As the name suggests, you can pick an Archetype which casts you as, say, a tricky winger or a hardman midfield enforcer; FC 26 will have 13 Archetypes to choose from.

In Player Career, there are also two new origin stories for your player – academy graduate and goalkeeper – which brings the overall number to four. Otherwise, Player Career should generally be pretty similar to that of FC 25.

Ultimate Team is perhaps the FC franchise’s most popular mode and, in keeping with EA’s approach to the rest if the game, it has received a pretty substantial revamp for FC 26.

The most obvious addition is a new mode called Gauntlets, in which players will participate in a streak of up to five games with the constraint that, for each game they will have to pick a completely different squad, substitutes and all.

Tournaments will also return to Ultimate Team, in a four-round, classic knock-out format; together with Gauntlets, these will constitute what EA Sports calls Live Events in FC 26’s Ultimate Team. EA Sports has also tweaked Ultimate Team’s midweek mode, Rivals, to address the problem of players being promoted to leagues too esoteric for their gameplay skills – lose too many games this time around and you will be relegated.

The company has also added incentives to Rivals, designed to keep your interested even if you’re not winning games, including Bounties, which are in-game objectives. There’s also a new weekend league in Ultimate Team, aimed at those who find the competition as it stood in FC 25 too skilful, entitled Challengers, which may just entice more casual players to try Ultimate Team.

In FC 26, Clubs will benefit from changes seen elsewhere in the game, including the addition of Archetypes and Live Events, which in Clubs will consist of limited time Rush tournaments with specific entry requirements. Another major tweak is that you’ll be able to join up to three clubs at once, should you so wish.

Whether the myriad tweaks and upgrades that EA is adding to FC 26 will hit a nerve remains to be seen – it’s such a complex game these days that it effectively has to support several different fan-bases, hence the introduction of the Competitive and Authentic gameplay tunings.

But it seems that the company has been listening to its community, and from the limited hands-on experience we enjoyed it certainly felt spot-on, especially in Competitive mode. While the rest is detail, we suspect these gameplay upgrades will prove irresistible to seasoned followers of FC. If you played FC 25 and found it somewhat ponderous and heavy, then FC 26 is anything but.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (previewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £69.99
Publisher: EA
Developer: EA Vancouver and EA Romania
Release Date: 26th September 2025
Age Rating: 3

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