Review: EA Sports FC 26 (PS5)

We suppose you could say EA Sports FC 26 is a game of two halves.

For years now there’s been a push and pull between different types of virtual football players, some preferring a more true-to-life representation of the beautiful game, while others want a more fast-paced, arcade-leaning experience.

EA Sports’ solution? Authentic and Competitive presets which do genuinely change the game.

The publisher appears to have recognised that the audience for the former is your traditional offline player, who prefers to get into the weeds of their Manager mode by nurturing youth talent and scouting undiscovered South American wunderkinds.

Meanwhile, the latter is tuned for the sweats who live in Ultimate Team, cracking packs and swearing at the screen when they narrowly miss out on promotion in Rivals mode.

You can use the Competitive preset offline if you prefer, but you can’t take Authentic online. We suppose it’d perhaps make sense to add an option for the latter in online play eventually, but there’s no sign of that here at launch.

Before you start, we appreciate offline and online gameplay has always been tuned independently in this series, but Authentic and Competitive do genuinely feel dramatically different here – even to the most casual of observers.

The pace of the game is much faster in Competitive, and players are much nimbler and more capable of superhuman feats.

In Authentic, the ball moves much slower, and you need to work harder for scoring opportunities because the gameplay has been tuned around real-life data. Unless, say, Harry Kane is on the end of your crosses, those headers aren’t always going to go in anymore.

We like the Authentic preset because it brings an air of unpredictability to the experience. Sometimes in football you have to deal with sub-optimal conditions, like a sticky pitch or heavy wind. Those are all factors simulated here, which may force you to change your strategy.

If you’re the type of player who likes to tinker, then this year’s game will force you into that mindset more than any other. We opted for a random South Korean team in the K-League for our campaign, and we’ve been having a huge amount of fun trying to get the most out of a middling squad.

Outside of the new presets, the developer has also reprogrammed goalkeeper positioning, with a view to eradicating irritating errors and bounce backs. Obviously, it’s going to take months of gameplay to prove whether EA Sports has been successful in its ambition, but we haven’t found ourselves screaming at the screen just yet, which is a positive start.

The Career mode is largely familiar outside of these changes, although the addition of unexpected off the pitch drama gives you a few new variables to deal with. We’re not sure we can be arsed with cryptic social media posts and players who refuse to arrive on time for training, but these are all factors real-life managers have to deal with, so it adds to the authenticity we suppose.

We guess the most controversial change this year is the addition of a Season Pass, which in a game already bursting with microtransactions was inevitable.

But we really don’t like the way some Icons and Heroes, which can be ported into Career mode, are now locked behind the Premium Pass here – especially when it costs money and currently requires you to engage with Ultimate Team to make meaningful progress.

It’s all part of a series that’s increasingly looking for new ways to monetise its offerings, and feels icky like NBA 2K26. It goes without saying that the usual gacha and loot box aspects return in Ultimate Team, and you’ll already know exactly how you feel about that.

Speaking of Ultimate Team, a big new feature this year is Live Events, which is designed to make you think more about the squads you use. We suppose this will add a degree of creativity throughout the season, rather than rely on the gradual power creep that occurs every year. Again, though, we’ll only truly know how successful this turns out to be once it’s been implemented throughout the course of the year.

Gauntlets also have a similar objective of forcing you to dig deep into your collection of cards, as you’ll be tasked with playing up to five different matches, each time with a different squad. This does all give more purpose to your team building, and we really like the concept in principle.

Outside of these headline changes, there’s a lot of minutiae which moves EA Sports FC 26 forward in several areas, but will perhaps best appeal to stalwarts who’ve played the previous game to death.

New Archetypes add further refinement to Player Career and Clubs, for example; to be honest, the latter is a mode we personally rarely touch, but we know fans will appreciate this change.

And the presentation remains outstanding across the board. While we still reckon the commentary is a long way from where it should be, all of the drama surrounding each match day helps to immerse you into the experience; the only criticism we’d lobby at the release is that we think the Ultimate Team menus have taken a step backwards this year.

Conclusion
By truly dividing the gameplay between two very distinct presets, EA Sports FC 26 is trying to appeal to everybody. The more methodical Authentic toggle will attract offline Career mode tinkerers, who want to work hard for those scrappy 1-0 wins. Meanwhile, the snappier Competitive option is built for online sweats, who want to force their opponents into submission by burying them in goals. Both feel good in their own ways, and when paired with several new features and refinements, you get a flexible game of football that should please everyone – well, aside from those who simply can’t jive with the franchise’s over-reliance on monetisation.