EA Sports FC 27 review: come for The Grounds, stay for Career

I’ll say one thing for EA Sports FC 27: it’s not the same game as EA Sports FC 26.

That reads like a compliment — and in some respects, it is — but where previous entries in EA’s long-running football simulator series shipped with minor improvements and equally minor frustrations, FC 27 takes bigger swings that flip between successful, insignificant, and occasionally experience-worsening in their execution.

I wish I could package that sentiment into a neat metaphor (‘a mixed bag’ is too hackneyed), but I can’t — so here’s the Cliffs Notes version of my review:

EA’s shiny new mode, The Grounds, is a hollow imitation of NBA 2K's The City. Ultimate Team is objectively better than it was in FC 26, but is still geared towards card-collecting youngsters and time-rich YouTubers. Career mode is the best it’s ever been, but is oddly prone to breakage by the same new features that make it better. And the overall FC gameplay experience is more challenging than before, but more rewarding as a result.

Still with me? I’ll run through each of those mini-verdicts as you read on, but you get the idea: EA Sports FC 27 is immense fun in parts, dull in others, and a generally quite confusing entry in a series that rarely changes so much from one year to the next. But hey, change is good... right?

Around The Grounds (and out again)

This year’s big new addition to the FC franchise is The Grounds — an ‘open-world’ reimagining of the series’ Clubs mode in which you can compete with friends or randoms in both stadium- and street-based challenges.

I put ‘open-world’ in quotation marks because The Grounds is not so much a free-roam experience as a third-person menu-hopping one. The idea of exploring three “cultural hubs of football” sounds cool, but in reality, these hubs are little more than poorly rendered maps populated by lifeless NPCs (non-player characters), Riddler Trophy-style Drop Kick Targets, and PvP waiting areas.

The game modes available within The Grounds are fun enough — there are traditional 11v11 matches, FIFA Street-style cage matches, and more casual mini-games like the basketball-inspired Bucket Ball — but the ‘open-world’ aspect of the experience adds little beyond longer wait times (because you now have to travel from A to B on foot) and the ability to customize your pro’s wardrobe with licensed clothing. At a price, of course.

I won’t lie: I did have a good time building my pro and was excited to get out into The Grounds’ virtual world. But once I’d played a handful of matches and completed enough Alex Hunter-ordered errands to buy myself a cool headband (Kylian Mbappé, Paulo Dybala, and Chloe Kelly are the other ‘mentors’), the novelty of this new open-but-actually-closed game mode quickly wore off.

With enough friends in tow, I can imagine The Grounds being a lot of fun, and I don’t criticize EA for trying something genuinely new with FC 27. I’m just not sure The Grounds actually is all that new — it’s more like Clubs with an extremely elaborate menu system.

Players for points

Opening Ultimate Team (FUT) for the first time in FC 27 feels like walking into a nightclub sober. You’re immediately hit with a barrage of menus, cards, and checklists, which is a frankly disorienting experience until you remember that this is exactly what FUT has been like for several years now.

Still, once you get over the customary nausea, there are some genuinely neat improvements to be found in this year’s edition of EA’s most popular (and profitable) mode.

My favorite addition is Streamlined SBCs (Squad Building Challenges). These are essentially SBCs that swap the starting XI puzzle aspect for a cumulative target score — each player in your club has a value, and you need to exchange enough players to reach that score. You don’t need to worry about formations, positions, or chemistry; instead, Streamlined SBCs are purely a numbers game.

Traditional SBCs are still present and correct in FC 27 — I personally enjoy the challenge of completing the weekly Marquee Matchups SBC — but with Streamlined SBCs, EA has acknowledged that most players aren’t fussed about the puzzling they require. Streamlined SBCs are for those who, understandably, want to snag the SBC reward in as little time as possible. But I appreciate that EA has kept both SBC types in the game.

The Gallery is a less meaningful but otherwise harmless addition to FUT. It’s a sticker book-style card-collection feature that tracks every player who’s ever passed through your club and encourages you to curate these players into graded sets. Doing so earns you trinkets and cosmetics (boring), but also Gallery Tokens (less boring), which can be spent on special Hall of FUT players like Loïc Rémy, Adebayo Akinfenwa, and Marouane Fellaini.

Honestly, the Gallery interface is as dizzying to navigate as everything else in FUT, but at least there are tangible player rewards to be gained from taking the time to understand it. I just wish The Gallery were available in the FC 27 Web App, so I could kill time grading cards while on my evening commute, and not while playing FC 27 proper.

Jockey down the line

It’s a little hard to give a comprehensive verdict on gameplay in FC 27, since EA is tweaking the mechanics all the time, but broadly speaking, the biggest gameplay changes apply to defending and set pieces.

On the former, there’s now less AI assistance, so computer-controlled players on your team (i.e., those you haven’t switched to yet) won’t auto-tackle an opponent, meaning you’ve got to be quicker on your L1/LB draw and smarter with your tackle timing. Jockeying is faster for all players as a result, which also makes the Jockey PlayStyle less overpowered than it was in FC 27.

As someone who’s better at defending than attacking, I’m all for these defensive changes — and the redesigned corner kicks system also puts more importance on defenders in this year’s game.

There’s now a longer pause between the taking of a corner kick and the ball’s arrival in the box, and — finally! — you get manual control over player positioning within the box itself. This change means corners are now skill-based rather than luck-based, which is absolutely what they felt like before (even if EA would never say so).

I spend most of my time playing the Authentic gameplay preset in Career mode, which is a different kettle of fish entirely, but for those who play Competitive in FUT, I’d say defending and corner kicks have seen the most noticeable tweaks in FC 27.

Skilled dribblers now ride challenges more effectively, too, but this isn’t such a significant gameplay tweak in my experience — but then again, I haven’t played too many online matches in FUT, which is where you’re likely to come up against the dribble-happy duo of Ousmane Dembélé and Lamine Yamal. I’ll pray for your controller.

The Art of the Deal

After fulfilling my testing-time obligations in The Grounds and Ultimate Team, I couldn’t wait to dive into FC 27’s refreshed Career mode. And judging by the view counts on EA’s YouTube Deep Dives for the game (the Career Deep Dive has the most views by a margin of over 1 million ), there’s a good chance that you, too, are more interested in FC 27’s slower-paced managerial simulator than any of its other modes.

The big changes this year apply to transfers. The awkward 3D negotiation scenes have been replaced with FIFA 13-style 2D negotiations, primarily because there’s a lot (and I mean a lot) more negotiating to be done in FC 27.

Previously, you’d offer a sum of money for a player, and if the selling club accepted your price, you’d then negotiate personal terms with the player in question. That was it. Two steps. You could pretty much buy any player for any club if you had the funds to do so.

In FC 27, transfer negotiations are far more realistic — for better and worse.

Now, if you’ve got your eyes on a player, you first have to send an inquiry to determine whether their current club is willing to sell them. The players themselves can also reject your advances if they’re simply not interested in joining your club — regardless of the money you might’ve been prepared to pay them and their club. If you’re rejected, you won’t be told the reasons why, but EA says player decision-making is based on tactical fit, club finances, form, historical rivalries, and long-term club philosophy.

And trust me: you will get rejected a lot. Or at least I was while playing as Everton. I couldn’t convince 80% of my transfer targets to even come to the negotiating table, and even when I did get close to signing a target, they’d invariably be stolen at the last minute by a bigger rival (Newcastle, for instance, accepted my offer for Harvey Barnes, but Barnes rejected me to join Chelsea on deadline day. Mercenary!).

If you do get to the negotiation stage, there are some nice new ways to structure deals, including with transfer instalments, agent fees, and performance-based bonuses. But I was honestly surprised by how difficult it was to sign players generally.

You can make transfer negotiations easier — they’re set to strict by default when you start a save — but actually, after the initial difficulty shock, I came to enjoy the challenge. Sure, I didn’t get most of my initial transfer targets, but that struggle made my eventual signings — Patrik Schick, Lucas Bergvall, Dan Ballard, and Raúl Asencio on loan — feel more rewarding as a result. It also felt very Everton to be rejected or outbid so frequently.

One big negative, though, is that players are absolute prima donnas in FC 27 Career mode — and their stinking attitudes can sometimes present a real headache.

It’s entirely possible that large groups of players hand in transfer requests at the same time because, as per the new minutes system, a player with 41% or higher stamina expects to play. If they don’t, they get annoyed and request a transfer. That (sort of) makes sense, but it’s particularly problematic if you like to simulate lots of matches, as the computer will only play high-stamina players (think 70% stamina and above).

I’ve seen some streamers complain that the game’s liberal transfer request system has ground their Career saves to a halt, and even if you can appease your unruly squad, it’s not particularly enjoyable to feel like virtual players are managing you, rather than the other way around.

Unexpected Events are back in FC 27, too, and these random scenarios — like Abrupt Retirement or Urgent Family Leave — can similarly disrupt the flow of a season.

I’m all for being tested as a manager, but Career mode feels particularly patience-testing this year — it’s more rewarding in places, sure, but it would be nice to play five straight matches without an injury, a mutiny, or an unmissable family funeral.

Dynamic Overall is a more positive addition to Career mode in FC 27. It’s essentially a dynamic rating system that causes player ratings to fluctuate throughout the season instead of staying fixed. Form, morale, and fitness can all make a player’s rating go up or down, and transfer values are impacted by big changes in rating.

In my Everton save, Tyler Dibling played so well so consistently that his rating went from 74 to 83 in a matter of months — that seems ridiculous on paper, but it’s actually representative of how player values change drastically in real life. Good feature!

Should you play EA Sports FC 27?

Play it if...

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Accessibility features

Like its predecessors, EA Sports FC 27 offers a comprehensive suite of accessibility options, including settings for subtitles, button remapping, color blindness, and increasing the size of the player indicator. It also features a dedicated High Contrast Mode for low-vision and cognitively disabled players.

All of these accessibility options can be found in a dedicated Accessibility Settings tab. The game has six difficulty levels — Beginner, Amateur, Semi-Pro, Professional, World Class, Legendary, and Ultimate — and features support for 21 languages.

How I reviewed EA Sports FC 27

I played EA Sports FC 27 for a month, having received the game a few days ahead of its official Early Access release on September 18. During that time, I had access to all modes and features and was able to compete against real-world players who also had early review access to the game.

I played on PS5, using a standard DualSense controller, on a Samsung QN95A Neo QLED 4K TV. I’ve played every EA Sports football title since FIFA 13, and also reviewed FIFA 22, FIFA 23, EA Sports FC 24, EA Sports FC 25, and EA Sports FC 26 for TechRadar Gaming.

First reviewed: October 2025.