EA Sports FC 27 review – the best football game since FIFA

This year’s edition of EA’s all-conquering football game franchise adds an appealing social hub and much-needed tweaks to fundamental gameplay.

Right now, with the Premier League back in full swing, following the World Cup and the shortest of off-season periods, football feels more ubiquitous than ever, at least in the real world. In the world of video games, meanwhile, another bout of football fever is set to hit consoles and PC, with the arrival of EA Sports FC 27, the latest instalment of the world’s most successful football game.

The video game series once known as FIFA until – in what looks like an increasingly prescient move – EA split with the world football governing body in 2023 is, along with Call Of Duty and some American sports sims, one of the few annual franchises left in gaming. Which creates a yearly dilemma for fans of the franchise, over whether this year’s offering brings enough to the table to justify buying it and essentially abandoning last year’s game.

As ever, it’s equally difficult to offer a definitive verdict on that question, especially since FC 27, like its predecessors, is a sprawling and multi-faceted video game designed to appeal to a number of different gaming constituencies. From the online hardcore fan with pro player aspirations to those who enjoy five-a-side kickabouts, EA Sports FC is a franchise that aims to please everyone – even if it’s not always on target.

EA Sports FC 26 was pretty good, but FC 27 is demonstrably better than its immediate predecessor in many key, fundamental aspects – most notably improved mechanics that apply to the actual football which you play in the game. All of FC 26’s most glaring faults, such as an odd tendency for balls to ricochet unrealistically off intercepting defenders and into the path of lurking forwards, have been eliminated. Plus, judicious structural tweaks have been made to stop FC Ultimate Team (FUT) fans from creating teams full of super-players that turned the latter stages of that part of the game into a series of stalemates.

There’s one major new addition to FC 27 which EA clearly hopes will drive sales, out of a sense of curiosity at the very least. It’s called The Grounds and is simple enough to describe; it’s a new social hub for the game, designed to celebrate all aspects of modern football culture, which you can physically navigate as your own avatar. As such, it is conceptually similar to The City, a similar hub that can be found in 2K Games’ recent NBA 2K games.

Mercifully, in execution The Grounds in no way resembles The City (the latter being annoyingly brash, commercially focused, and Americanised). It’s split into three areas inspired by English, French, and Argentinian football culture, and is sufficiently quirky and believable (for example, in the Argentinian area, you find random people having barbecues, while the English one has a pub which, sadly, you can’t actually enter) to provide an environment which is pleasant enough that you feel inclined to explore it fully.

It’s also studded with a large number of jump-in street football style minigames, ranging from 1v1 to 5v5 formats, along with plenty of quirkier variations, such as Balloon Ball. This gives each player three balloons that your rival must burst, by kicking balls at them and employing power-ups such as tyres that spawn and trip them up. All of The Grounds’ areas are dotted with green glowing targets, and you can spawn balls to drop kick at them; this often generates other targets (sometimes hidden behind metal dummies used to simulate stationary players in training), creating puzzles which are surprisingly satisfying. Although, at least until The Grounds is fully populated with real players, you aren’t rewarded much for solving them.

Renditions of real players including Kylian Mbappé, Paulo Dybala and Chloe Kelly act as your mentors in The Grounds, and you are rewarded for performing tasks they set. Those who despise microtransactions beware though, since The Grounds has its own new currency, along with shops filled with cosmetic items in which to spend said virtual cash.

The Grounds also operates as the game’s new home for Clubs, the 11v11 competition in which you control a single player, which is a popular destination for FC players who want to play online in a more casual manner. It makes sense that Clubs should reside within The Grounds, and The Grounds will particularly resonate with the sort of modern gamers who like to express themselves via outrageously dressed avatars.

In FC 27, there’s particularly good news for those whose preferred first port of call in the game is Manager Career, the mode in which you take charge of a club (most likely the one you support) and demonstrate your managerial skills. This year, Manager Career has been extensively revamped to make it more realistic, taking greater account of the way in which modern player transfers come about.

That means those who insist on wringing every ounce of value out of transfers can negotiate individually with players’ entourages, as well as the clubs that own them, and even after negotiations are concluded it takes a while before players you buy can actually be deployed on the pitch. But you can also cave to demands, getting those players you really want quickly. As a Spurs fan, for example, I was easily able to offload Richarlison for a decent fee and replace him with Brentford’s Igor Thiago. EA could easily have made the transfer system more complicated than previously, but instead it just seems more logical and believable.

Another new element which plays into that transfer system, but mainly into the man-management of your squad, is Dynamic OVRs. OVRs are just your players’ overall ratings but whereas previously they were set in stone, in FC 27 they are affected by various factors including morale, form, and fitness. Which, again, seems to make more logical sense than the previous system and means that you have to rotate your players much more assiduously than before, over the course of a season.

Unhappy players will send you text messages, to which you must pick the right response, and the Dynamic OVR system also dangles the prospect of, for example, picking up players on the way back from injury on the cheap. Overall, FC 27’s Manager Career is a triumph, and if it’s your preferred element of the game, you’ll be impressed by how much better it is than its equivalent in FC 26.

Player Career, meanwhile, is quite similar to that of FC 26, with the obvious addition of Dynamic OVRs, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since it previously worked pretty well and in FC 27 proves as addictive as ever.

One thing it does provide, though – as does Manager Career – is an opportunity to appreciate the much-needed tweaks EA has made to fundamental gameplay, going so far as to rip out various physics engines and rethink animations in certain scenarios. The free kick and corner taking systems have been rethought, so that having set your initial delivery you can then take control of the striker you’re aiming for before the set piece takes place. We still found that with corners, in particular, end results were a bit mixed, but they at least feel under your control, rather than semi-automated.

Crosses now actually go where you aim them, making them much more of a weapon, whereas previously you would have tended to get to the byline and pull the ball back along the ground. General player movement, especially of forwards, is also vastly better than it was previously. Attackers curve their runs more intelligently, so don’t stray offside so much, and it’s much easier to time productive passes from midfield into, for example, channels for wingers or inside forwards.

The tendency for central defenders to charge unhelpfully up the field has also been curbed, by simply giving you more control over your defenders’ movement; in FC 27, you spend more time making sure the correct one of your defenders is highlighted, but at least you feel in full control.

The nature of FUT, which develops as you collect player cards over the course of a whole season, means that it’s pretty much impossible to assess accurately until FC 27 has been on the market for quite a while. And yet FUT players are notoriously demanding and difficult to please.

But the changes that EA has made to it for FC 27 certainly make logical sense. The headline addition is a gallery, which offers a virtual repository for all the vast amount of players and ephemera that you will collect over the course of a FUT season. But it also offers a new means of progression in your FUT season, with its own collection challenges that provide a sort of echo of squad building challenges (SBCs), albeit without the complication for which SBCs became notorious.

A new addition for FUT is holographic player items, basically special versions of players that bring particular benefits as you flesh out your gallery. EA also says that it has tackled rumblings of discontent about many SBCs requiring tedious grinding by introducing a new Streamlined SBCs system. It’s too early to tell whether this new system will be successful, but anything that adds extra flexibility to SBCs must be welcomed.

The upshot is that FC 27 is one of the best FIFA/FC games in living memory. Not only does it fix the glaring technical faults that its immediate predecessor was saddled with, it offers something new and attractive to young, socially inclined players via The Grounds. Most importantly of all, the actual football that takes place on its pitches is better and more controllable than it has ever been. The same applies emphatically to Manager Career, which is now believable as well as totally compelling.

EA has, for years now, cultivated and listened to a brains trust of gamers loyal to the franchise, and that really shows in FC 27. Not that it has yet achieved anything near perfection. The menu system can still prove arcane and tedious to navigate – particularly when you’re in The Grounds and want to quickly shift to another part of the game.

The downside of The Grounds is that it adds yet another to the game’s myriad in-games currencies – parents, more than ever, will have to be vigilant to make sure their offspring don’t rack up huge microtransaction bills when playing it. Although children shouldn’t be playing FC 27 anyway, since those microtransactions have led PEGI to giving it a 16 rating.

Despite these issues, FC 27 has all the ingredients required to be considered a classic iteration of the FIFA/FC franchise, and given the lack of significant improvement in some yearly sequels, that practically makes this a must-have.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £69.99
Publisher: EA
Developer: Insomniac Games
Release Date: 25th September 2026*
Age Rating: 16

*available from 18th September 2026 with Ultimate Edition (£99.99) and Ultimate Edition Plus (£139.99)

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