EA heard all our complaints about FC 25. I and many others lamented that last year’s game was far too similar to FC 24 and was lacking major changes, and it certainly feels like EA took note of this. EA Sports FC 26, then, comes with some changes that do make it play differently to the previous FC games, though a lot of familiarity (and poor defending) remains.
The big change in FC 26 is the addition of Authentic and Competitive gameplay styles, split between the single player and multiplayer sides of the game. Authentic mode is designed to recreate the proper action on the pitch, getting closer to what you would see in a real life match, making things a bit slower and more focused on tactical play rather than sprinting to goal and shooting. That’s the competitive mode and is for online play so matches move quickly and players can go end-to-end while chasting scoring opportunities.
If you are going to play the single player modes, I’d recommend at least playing on World Class difficulty for a real world and authentic feel. Teams act a bit more like their real life counterparts adhering to their tactical shapes and instructions. At Professional difficulty and below, it is too  easy to break through opposition defences and have scorelines getting near double digits, which does get boring after a while. It is a continuing issue through the franchise where defending play is just non-existent outside of the higher difficulties, and it is something that I would hope would be looked at. Beating Fulham 9-0 and then Brentford 8-1 a week later as Chelsea on Professional difficulty should just not be happening.
Manager Career and Player Career will remain the two go-to options for single player. Like the previous entry you can choose a real manager or player to play as or create your own – shoutout to Mehdi Leris of Pisa who was the real life player I chose after picking a team at random team. While there is not much difference as a player, EA has tried to refresh the managerial side with unexpected events that can impact the team and individual players. These can range from the coach getting to the ground late so your players don’t have much time to warm up, impacting their sharpness, and can go to the extreme of players getting career ending injuries leading them to retire. You never know when an unexpected event will happen – it’s kind of in the name – which does make career mode a bit more unpredictable.
The youth team is once again an integral part of career, where you can play as them in tournaments and create development plans. There is quite a bit of depth to objectives and player development, but do not expect something on par with Football Manager. You can also pick Live points to start the seasons with, with real life results from the season so far added in already.
Outside of Career is Ultimate Team, Squad Battles, Rush, Clubs and regular online matches for those who want to face off against the world. It is in these online matches where you will be playing with the faster paced Competitive setting. There have been some changes to Ultimate team with the addition of Live events, allowing players to face off against each in varied match settings. There is also the new tournament and gauntlet feature, with tournaments running at different points of the season instead of every week. In Gauntlet, you play a run of five matches but in each successive match you need to swap your players around, essentially giving them every player in your club a run out. It is probably best to save those gold players for the latter stages.
Another new thing is the ability to now evolve goalkeepers, which was oddly missing from FC 25. Your online enjoyment obviously depends on the rest of the player base, but in Ultimate Team there are already squads consisting of the best players where people have invested to get them, though there are challenges that will only allow you to use certain ranked players to get people to play with more varied squads.
