FC 26 Review: Better Than FC 25, But EA Is Still EA

I am not a FIFA player, especially FC 26. I never really have been — I have played every entry in the franchise over the years, but football games have never been my main thing. So when I tell you I bought FC 26 specifically for the World Cup mode, that context matters. The 2026 FIFA World Cup is happening right now. The actual tournament. In real life. And I got completely swept up in the excitement of it — the matches, the drama, the atmosphere — and I thought to myself, I want to play this. I want to experience the World Cup on my PC, play as my favourite nations, run a tournament, and feel that energy in a game. So I bought FC 26. A game I would not normally purchase. Purely for the World Cup mode. And it did not work.

I do not mean it was disappointing. I do not mean it fell short of expectations. I mean, the feature I bought the game for genuinely did not function the way it should. The World Cup mode that was supposed to be the centrepiece of this release — the thing EA has been marketing around one of the biggest sporting events on the planet — failed to deliver the experience it promised. That is a genuinely awful feeling when you have spent money on something specifically for one reason, and that reason lets you down. And the most infuriating part is knowing exactly what comes next — EA, a multimillion-dollar company with more than enough resources to fix this properly, will patch it eventually. And then probably lock the best version of it behind some kind of paywall. Because that is what EA does. That is who they are.

With all of that said, FC 26 outside of that specific disaster is actually a better game than FC 25 in several meaningful ways. That does not excuse what happened with the World Cup mode. But it is true, and it is worth discussing honestly. So here is the full picture.

What FC 26 Actually Gets Right

The gameplay is noticeably better than FC 25, and that improvement is felt from the very first match. The pace of the game has been pulled back slightly — matches feel less like a frantic sprint from end to end and more like actual football with actual build-up play. Defending is more responsive than it has been in recent entries, which means winning the ball back feels like a skill again rather than a lottery. First touch has been refined,d and the ball behaves more realistically when it comes to aerial balls and through passes landing at the right speed. These are not revolutionary changes, es but they are consistent improvements that add up across a full match into something that feels meaningfully better than what came before.

Career Mode has received the most meaningful single update in years. The new manager dynamics system gives you genuine control over your relationship with the board, the players, and the press in a way that previous entries only gestured at. Negotiations feel less scripted. Player morale has actual consequences on performance rather than just being a number that goes up and down on a menu screen. Young player development has been reworked, and for the first time in a long time, I found myself genuinely invested in bringing a youth player through the academy rather than just buying whoever had the highest rating. If you are a Career Mode player specifically,lly — FC 26 is the first entry in a while that feels like EA actually spent time on this mode rather than just leaving it to decay while they focused on Ultimate Team revenue.

The presentation has also taken a step forward. Broadcast packages are more varied, commentary lines feel fresher and reference things that have actually happened in real football rather than recycling the same observations from three versions ago, and the menus are cleaner and faster to navigate than the bloated interface FC 25 shipped with. None of this is gameplay, but it contributes to the overall experience feeling more polished and more considered than the previous entry. First impressions matter, and FC 26 makes a better one than FC 25 did.

Ultimate Team — Still The Centre of Everything, Still A Problem

Ultimate Team is where EA makes most of its money, and that financial reality shapes every decision made around it. FC 26’s FUT is more polished than ever — the content calendar is full, the special card events are creative, and the Champions and Elite Division structure gives competitive players clear goals to chase. If you love Ultimate Team and have made peace with the economy around it, FC 26 gives you more to do than any previous entry. The mode is genuinely well designed as a game within a game, and the moment-to-moment enjoyment of building a squad and competing with it is as high as it has ever been.

But. The packs are still predatory. The gap between a fully loaded FUT squad and a team built purely through gameplay is wider than EA will ever publicly acknowledge. Certain cards are essentially only accessible through spending real money or accumulating coins through hundreds of hours of grinding that most people simply do not have. The Weekend League structure still burns people out. None of this is new — it has been true for years — and the fact that EA has chosen to refine the mode’s content rather than address the fundamental economy speaks to exactly the kind of company they are. FC 26’s FUT is the best version of a system that has serious problems. Whether that is enough depends entirely on how you feel about those problems.

The World Cup Mode — My Biggest Disappointment With FC 26

This is the one that genuinely frustrated me, and I want to talk about it properly because it deserves more criticism than it has received. FC 26 includes a World Cup mode built around the 2026 FIFA World Cup — one of the biggest sporting events in the world, hosted across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, with 48 nations competing for the first time. The potential for this mode was enormous. What EA delivered is essentially a normal FIFA tournament mode with a World Cup overlay on top of it. The menus look like the World Cup. The trophy looks right. And almost everything underneath it is the same structure you have seen in this game for years, with no meaningful customisation or innovation.

The licensing situation is where it gets genuinely embarrassing. EA does not have the rights to every national team participating in the 2026 World Cup, and rather than acknowledging that limitation cleanly, they have filled the gaps with fabricated squads. Algeria is one of the most prominent examples — a nation with world-class players and a passionate football culture, completely absent from the licensed roster. Riyad Mahrez — one of the most recognisable footballers in the world, a Premier League champion, a player EA has had in their game for years through his club — is not in the Algeria national team in this mode because they do not have the rights. Instead, you get a made-up squad wearing Algeria’s colours with generic players who have nothing to do with the real team.

This is not a small thing. The World Cup is supposed to be a celebration of international football — every nation, every player, the full picture of the sport at its biggest moment. When you exclude real players and replace them with fictional ones, you are not just making a licensing compromise. You are actively degrading the experience for fans of those nations who wanted to play as their real team with their real players. Algeria fans wanted to play as Mahrez. Morocco fans wanted their real squad. The fans of every unlicensed nation deserved better than a made-up team wearing their colours. EA had the budget and the resources to secure more licensing deals. They chose not to. That choice tells you everything about where their priorities actually sit.

The mode itself, beyond the licensing issues, is also just shallow. There is no real depth to the World Cup experience — no buildup, no qualifying narrative, no sense of the journey that makes international tournaments emotionally compelling in real life. You pick a team, you play matches, you try to win the trophy. That is it. For a mode built around the most-watched sporting event on the planet, it feels like a missed opportunity so large that it is hard to look at it generously.

What FC 26 Still Has Not Fixed

The improvements to gameplay are real, but so are the things that have not changed. The scripting feeling — where matches seem to swing in momentum in ways that feel disconnected from what is actually happening on the pitch — is still present in FC 26. Whether this is intentional or a byproduct of the game’s AI systems is a debate that has been running in the football gaming community for years, and FC 26 does not settle it. What it does do is make certain matches feel less like a contest of skill and more like a predetermined outcome being played out, regardless of what you do. That feeling is deeply frustrating when it hits.

Set pieces are still not right. Headers are inconsistent in a way that makes aerial play feel unreliable rather than strategic. The referee system still produces decisions that make no sense on a regular enough basis that you notice it. Player switching during defensive situations still occasionally selects the wrong player at the worst possible moment. None of these are new problems. All of them have been present across multiple entries. The fact that FC 26’s genuine improvements exist alongside these same unresolved frustrations is the clearest evidence that EA is improving this game at exactly the pace they choose to — not the pace they are capable of.

Is FC 26 Actually Worth Buying — The Honest Answer

If you skipped FC 25 — yes, FC 26 is worth playing. The gameplay improvements are real, Career Mode is the best it has been in years, and the overall package is polished enough to justify your time. If you played FC 25 regularly, the honest answer is more complicated. The improvements are meaningful, but they are not transformative. The World Cup mode that should have been the flagship feature of this entry is a disappointment. Ultimate Team’s fundamental economy has not changed. The things that frustrated you about FC 25 are mostly still here, slightly improved around the edges.

And if you are someone who, like me, has played every entry in this franchise while never fully making peace with how EA runs it, FC 26 will feel exactly as expected. Better than last year. Not as good as it should be. Enough to keep you playing. Not enough to stop you wishing the biggest football game in the world was being made by a company that pushed itself harder. EA knows you will buy it. FC 26 knows you will buy it. The game is priced and designed with that certainty in mind, and no amount of genuine improvement fully escapes the shadow of that reality.

Final Verdict

FC 26 is the best EA football game in a few years, and that is worth acknowledging honestly. The gameplay is tighter, Career Mode has received genuine attention, and the presentation is the most polished the series has ever looked. If you play this franchise, these are real improvements that make real matches better, and that matters. I am not going to pretend otherwise just because I have complicated feelings about the company that made it.

But the World Cup mode is a genuine embarrassment. Fake squads, missing players, no depth, no innovation — built around the biggest football event in a generation and delivered as an afterthought. EA’s relationship with licensing is a choice, not a limitation, and the players left out of their own national teams in this mode deserved better. Algeria deserved Mahrez. Every unlicensed nation deserved its real squad. The fact that EA had the resources to make this right and chose not to is the clearest summary of what kind of company they are and what kind of game FC 26 ultimately is — genuinely improved in places, genuinely disappointing in others, and comfortable with both because it knows you are buying it anyway.

Final Score: 7/10 — Real improvements let down by a half-baked World Cup mode, unresolved gameplay frustrations, and a company that improves at its own pace rather than the pace its players deserve.

Mr. Sano

Hello! I am Mr. Sano Ethan, a content creator, variety gamer, and the driving force behind Kick Of Draft. With over 6 years of hands-on experience across PC, console, and indie gaming,