Some day it’ll happen and it will be glorious.

In Part 1 of this series we discussed the now defunct NCAA Football franchise and if you’ve played that in the past, or it’s professional counterpart Madden, you’ll know game-maker EA Sports isn’t in the business of knocking your socks off every year. When you look at the grand scheme the games really don’t change much for 3 years. By then, you’ll be lucky to get a new user interface and some significant changes that make you feel like you didn’t just pay $60 for last year’s game.

This brings us to the FIFA franchise, EA Sports’ prized possession that is the best-selling sports franchise video game of all-time with sales around 300 million copies since its debut in 1993. For the 2018 and 2019 games, the company shipped 45 million copies which at the $59.99 price is just a tick under $2.7 billion.

For the fiscal year 2019, EA made nearly $5 billion in revenue. Money isn’t a problem for the company, yet money is the problem with FIFA.

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Back in 2009, EA launched FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT) which quickly became a free part of the game that consists of players building a team from players all across the world. Except, you typically have to pay money for coins to get better players. Fast-forward a decade later and Ultimate Team sales (of which the FIFA game division dominates for EA) are bringing in $1.4 billion every year.

As a result, EA sports has taken their career mode–once the pride of the industry–and driven it completely into the ground due to a lack of care. How bad is it? Here’s the list of major new career mode features for the 2020 game:

  • More manager customization, including female managers for the first time.
  • Player chats affecting their morale.
  • Press conferences that affect team and player morale.

And that’s it.

If it’s not bad enough that the 2020 career mode is 99.9% the same as 2019, the official EA Sports page publicizing the new improvements has a nice big advertisement at the bottom for FIFA Ultimate Edition which is a $99.99 version of the game with, you guessed it, FUT packs and other Ultimate Team goodies.

Philadelphia 76ers center Joel Embiid is one of the loudest celebrity voices for an improved career mode and is a strong ally in bringing change to a once proud game play. Check out this thread from @FifaCMTips and see how not only has career mode been neglected over the years, it’s been properly gutted since FUT came along.

The most frustrating part of this is how much potential FIFA career mode has which was obvious before FUT arrived on the scene. Here’s a thorough list of changes to be made:

Realistic Manager Market

Right now you can create a manager, sign a deal, and have the opportunity to stay with your current club or chase a few other jobs on an extremely limited market. Other managers’ faces and names are in the game but you can’t control them at all. If you’d like to take a new job somewhere it’s pretty much impossible. Every time I play the game I want to take a smaller club up the ranks but in order to do that you have to start a new career.

The movement of the top managers is a huge part to soccer and being unable to track anything of the sort is ridiculous. You should be able to see all of the other managers’ records, use their custom strategies, while the hiring/firing of all of them should be a huge part of the game.

Player Stats

The lack of player stats is so shameful that jail time should be on the table. In the most recent game (and stretching back numerous years) all you can track are goals, assists, clean sheets, and player ratings. Plus, it all disappears once you start a new season!

This kills so much joy from the game. At the very least, carry over these stats from each season so we can track our own players and also those players I am looking to sign. Neglecting cumulative stats is the height of absurdity. It destroys the history you’re building in the game and drive so much boredom through the years.

Team Stats

FIFA has a page where it collects your wins/losses/draws/points for each season and career overall, plus a few other items like you’re biggest player purchase and sale or where you finished in each competition. It’s a good start but can’t we have more?

How about a screen for each competition that lists your all-time performances through the years? Why not a trophy case (soccer has so many trophies!) with your club’s history? Couldn’t there be a page that lists the most goals scored for the club? Or most yellow cards in a season? Or longest unbeaten streak? There’s nothing looking back at history and being able to chase it in the current game. Can some form of xG be added, too?

Create-a-Club

This has always felt like a layup and yet it has disappeared from the game. It’s difficult not to feel disillusioned about the reasons why it is no longer available. I’ll have more on this below.

Club Finances

Unless you completely suck at FIFA, eventually money becomes no object. Even if you start out at a small club–if you keep winning–hundreds of millions will continually flow into your budget and within a few years you’re left debating if this 21-year old superstar winger is worth buying at $60 million to be a backup on your roster. You’ll spend money just because, why not? The board doesn’t carry over surplus money from the previous year anyway, spend it!

This needs to be the biggest change in the game: the finances for your club should be more intricate and difficult to manage. Turning $320 million profit every season is unrealistic enough while turning around and being given $180 million in transfer money every year is even worse.

Every club should be saddled with some form of debt and financial loans to repay. The club owners should randomly spend more money, or take out new loans, for a variety of business ventures. Your wage structure should be much more concrete–you shouldn’t be able to sign a new player making $320,000 per week without your next 4 highest paid players, all of whom make $200,000/week, demanding new contracts. A wide variety of facility improvements should drain funds and just like real-life transfer money should often come in installments so you’re constantly checking your budget and managing monthly cash flow.

You can play FIFA for 15 seasons with a decent sized club and never, ever have to wait for a sale of a player to free up more wage money for another player. That’s just not how things work in real life.

Let’s take the finances of 2016-17 Real Madrid for example, a famous club who won the La Liga and Champions League double for the first time in their long history. The club brought in $800 million in revenue, was actually tame on the transfer market that year with a +$5 million net spending, and yet only turned $25 million profit for the whole season.

Why so little profit off one of the most successful seasons in Spanish soccer history in a year where Madrid spent money on only one incoming transfer? Is it because of debt? No, the club only carried $12 million in debt for 2016-17, easily covered by their liquid cash profit. It’s largely because Madrid spends a lot of money on player wages, and team success triggered millions in bonuses for player, coach, and staff alike.

FIFA should be like this, the more you win the more you’re paying in millions for bonuses and triggered contract clauses.

Stadium Maintenance & Improvement

Every other sports game in the world has some stadium maintenance dealings, not FIFA! Even if you don’t want to add something like relocation and building a brand-new stadium, there should be deep work on maintaining your current structure, adding enhancements, and negotiating with local authorities to buy more land for expansion.

This should all be in an effort to spend more money and make the game more realistic and difficult to manage.

Sponsorships/Kit Changes

Sadly, it feels like European football–the English Premier League in particular–has become so big that certain aspects to the FIFA game may never be fun again. For example, when Chevy is paying nearly $100 million per year to Manchester United they probably wouldn’t love a game in which you could change a shirt sponsor.

At the very least, fake companies should be included for secondary sponsorships.

The lack of kit options is an abomination, though. Give us the ability to change colors, design new uniforms, and update the brand through the years. Also, if a team wears multiple socks depending on kit clashes make it possible to change the socks before a game. Give us multiple throwbacks, this is so easy.

Youth Teams

Nothing about the current youth teams in FIFA feels remotely fun. A couple scouts search a country for a bunch of teenager, you sign some to your youth team, and eventually they will magically grow in ability to the point where you might sign a few of them to your senior team. You really know nothing about these players, there’s really nothing to manage, and it’s super boring.

There should be an Academy for under 16-year olds, plus an Under-18 and Under-23 team just like real life. They should have their own leagues and stats with resources that need to be kept up to maintain a strong youth development program. This would breathe life into a part of the game that is sorely lacking.

Obviously, this would require extremely expanded scouting to build an academy. Is more programming too much to ask?

Reconfigure Loans

For years, FIFA has made it difficult at worst and inconvenient at best to loan players out which only makes youth players less of a priority. Far too often, you’d only be able to loan out 3 out of the 9 players you wanted to and the 6 who stayed grew just as strong in your club with barely playing anyway.

There should be an abundance of loan deals with in-depth negotiations over paying salaries and buy-back clauses. Additionally, details about a player’s progress while away from your club are sorely needed. Now, all you get is minimum stats updates and that’s only if the player is loaned to the same league and competitions you’re in. If not, you literally know nothing about their progress.

There should be weekly loan reports featuring much more information like fitness levels, player ratings, injuries, system fit, and other positives or negatives. There should be more loans but also a trickier system that makes loans go very right or very wrong.

Transfer History & Updates

Like many things in FIFA, once you change the calendar the information is gone forever. How much did you spend with incoming transfers for 2020-21? How much transfer money have you brought in over the last 3 years? Unless you’re keeping a notebook on your own this info isn’t available.

Further, transfers should become much more difficult. The new animated transfer negotiation process added a couple years ago (with initial fee, sell-on clause, player swaps) is fun and I wouldn’t advocate any silly inflated transfer fee pricing as long as the rest of the game provides more realistic finances.

Still, the contract negotiations need work. The guts of the current system including contract length, team role, release clause, weekly wage, signing bonus, and one other bonus (appearances, goals, clean sheets, etc.) are a great foundation. There needs to be more haggling and variables, though.

Club prestige is a good way to control the market. For example, a star 19-year old from a small club in France may balk at signing with your huge club as a step too far at his age. The opposite can be true if your club lacks prestige. This is a good way of preventing you from signing 50% of the top youth players in the world every year.

Beyond this, player agents need to get involved asking hefty fees on their behalf. Some agents should have a natural aversion to your club and be difficult to negotiate with while the same is true if you fail a negotiation with the agent in the past. Pump in multiple bonuses for every contract and a ton of emphasis on minutes played (this should be tracked!) tied to player happiness and we’re golden.

Home-Grown, Registration & FFP

Soccer clubs are dominated by three things that are conspicuously absent from the FIFA games:

Home Grown Player Rule – In England, for example, a minimum of 8 players need to be home grown. These are defined as players who have spent at least 3 years with an English club prior to turning 21 years old, even if they are not English-born.

Registration – To compete in the English Premier League you need to register 25 players, while you can use Under-21 players beyond the 25-player limit. Similar rules apply to various other competitions and cups throughout the world.

Financial Fair Play – Enacted almost a decade ago, FFP basically means you cannot spend more than you earn over a 3-year period. If your incoming transfer fees, staff costs, and financing deals exceed your matchday sales, TV revenue, advertising, outgoing transfer fees, and prize money then you are subject to punishments including fines, point reductions, registration restrictions, transfer restrictions, and more.

In FIFA now you can have 52 players on your senior roster. FIFTY-TWO! Even when that includes those out on loan you can carry more than enough players to put together 3 separate teams. Which again, leads to the scenario mentioned above where you sign someone for tens of millions just to rotate in your squad once and a while.

Adding in these 3 real-life constrictions would make the game a lot more fun by focusing on a more concise squad with youth help while reigning in splashy transfer fees.

Why Won’t EA Sports Make These Changes?

This has been debated for years, especially as FIFA used to have some of these aspects in the past. Clearly, the primacy of FUT as a money-maker has allowed EA to turn its attention away from career mode. We also figure with the ballooning money spent by corporations that EA and FIFA would want to shy away from altering sponsors, uniforms, and allowing club creation in the game.

Would the game be too big and unwieldy with these career mode changes?

Currently, FIFA has 17,000 players in the game with “regens” taking the place of retired players. The largest changes to the game would be adding in the youth teams. If you give every one of the 700 clubs in FIFA a legit Under-23 team of 20 players that’s 14,000 more names. Let’s say the Big 5 League teams also get an Under-18 (20 players) and Youth Academy (15 players) now you’re looking at an additional 3,500 players, plus you’ll want a sizable pool youth free agents, let’s say an additional 1,500 players.

So this would be roughly a doubling of players in the game to 36,000 total, plus more scouts and more club personnel in general. This would put FIFA more on par with the Football Manager 20 game (from which many of today’s ideas come from) which has a whopping 87 more leagues than EA Sports’ latest offering.

Is this too much for hard drives? FIFA needs minimum 42 GB of space for Playstation 4 and up to 50 GB on PC. This pales in comparison to games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (175 GB), Red Dead Redemption 2 (150 GB), and Gears of War (110 GB) that rely so much on video graphics motion.

For what its worth, Football Manager gets by on just 7 GB but video graphics are a tiny part of the game. FIFA has a lot of graphics but even pushing the game up to 100 GB isn’t necessarily a problem, especially when the new Playstation 5 is going to have 825 GB available, up from 500 GB now.

Space shouldn’t be an issue, it’s a matter of effort from EA Sports. Some day that effort will return.