Community ManagerCommunity ManagerEvolving Manager Movement
With Manager Market, managers are no longer tied to a single club. Instead, they can be poached, sacked, or they may choose to pursue new opportunities, resulting in a living, ever-changing managerial environment across Career Mode.
How Managers Move
Opposition managers can leave their clubs in several ways:
When a club parts ways with its manager, a caretaker manager is sometimes appointed temporarily. Caretakers manage the team until a permanent replacement is found and, should their performance meet the board’s expectations, it can influence whether they are offered the job full-time.
If the caretaker isn’t deemed fit to take on the full-time job, the club will start looking for suitable candidates.
The following criteria is used to determine the compatibility of other managers for the job, and the club will create a shortlist of potential candidates:
After clubs make their shortlists, it’s the managers turn to decide if they will take on the opportunity. The comparison between the quality and the prestige of both clubs will be the deciding factor.
Job Application and Hiring Process
When a managerial position becomes available, you will have the opportunity to apply to the job should your performance and Tactical Vision align with the needs of the club.
If you have high compatibility with the club, you will be notified about the high likelihood of taking the job should you declare interest.
The better the compatibility you have with a club, the higher the chances your job application will be accepted.
The following factors determine your job compatibility:
You can shortlist jobs to monitor their status and receive notifications when those positions become available. The Suggestions tab highlights jobs that are a good fit for your current profile, making it easier to identify realistic opportunities
If you’re sacked, your agent will present a list of clubs interested in your services, reflecting your reputation and recent achievements.
Gameplay Implications
When AI-controlled managers take on a new job, they will try to instill their Tactical Vision on the club. This will change how opposition teams will play, making encounters against these teams more diverse.
The tactical changes will have an impact outside the pitch as well, as formation changes will have a ripple effect on the AI’s squad evaluation process, reevaluating a club’s needs as they define their transfer shortlist and which players will be deemed surplus to requirements.
Custom League Simulation and Career Setup
A core update to Career Mode in FC 26 is the introduction of Deeper Simulation. When starting a new Manager Career, you can now select up to five additional leagues to simulate, on top of your main one. This is managed in the settings screen during career creation.
This functionality gives you more control over the footballing world you want to experience. For example, when managing in the English Premier League, you can choose to simulate the top divisions in Spain, Germany, Italy, France, and the Netherlands, creating a more interconnected and detailed European football environment.
Alternatively, you can focus on regional rivalries or emerging leagues, tailoring the simulation to their interests or career narrative.
Additional Player Data and Enhanced Realism
With deeper simulation, Career Mode now brings in historical player data. At any time, players in the league your team is playing in and all selected simulated leagues, will have the previous season’s stats available.
These stats are also available during the first season, surfacing real-life data collected from the 24-25 season. The data includes:
This historical data is not just cosmetic, it directly impacts how you evaluate players, track development, and plan transfers. For example, you can now identify breakout performers from the previous season, monitor consistency, or spot under-the-radar talent based on real statistical trends.
Revamped Standings and Team Stats
The Standings section has been redesigned to centralise and enhance competition data. It now integrates information previously found in the Team Stats section, which has been retired.
The new Standings screen is interactive, enabling you to:
The Full Players List for any club in a simulated league now displays comprehensive stats across all competitions, with the option to filter by individual competition. This provides a holistic view of team and player performance, intended to support more nuanced decision-making.
Scouting Actions and Player Stats Improvements
Scouting and player analysis have been streamlined. When viewing a scout report for a player in a simulated league, you can directly access that player’s full stats, making it easier to compare and evaluate potential signings.
The Player Stats screen now includes a dedicated tab for Average Ratings, and it is also possible to filter stats by competition and season. This enables more granular analysis, such as comparing a player’s league and cup performances or tracking their progress over this season vs the previous one.
New Gameplay Opportunities and Strategic Depth
The ability to simulate multiple leagues and access detailed player data opens up new gameplay opportunities:
Community Impact and Future Potential
By giving you the tools to shape your own football universe and providing access to deeper data, Career Mode now supports a wider range of play styles, from hands-on managers who scout every league to those who want to focus on a single region.
The foundation laid by this feature also opens the door for future enhancements, such as expanded data analytics, more dynamic league interactions, and additional customisation options.
Career Mode players have asked for a more authentic, strategic, and immersive football experience, and now it’s here.
With the introduction of Authentic Gameplay, we’re creating a clear distinction between authentic football simulation and the more fast-paced approach of competitive online matches. This split empowers you to choose the experience that best fits your play style, and allows us to focus on delivering a more true-to-life football simulation that rewards thoughtful, tactical play.
Authentic Gameplay is the tailor-made, default setting for both Manager and Player Career Mode, and fundamentally transforms every match.
The movement and actions of the players on the pitch will look more realistic, with more granularity behind each pass and varied ball behavior, so being on your toes pays off.
You’ll experience battles for possession, with players fighting for control in the midfield and across the pitch. Every duel matters, every turnover can change the flow of the game, and matches can feel more open.
The overall pace is more tactical and methodical, encouraging patient build-up, smart positioning, and strategic decision-making over relying on speed or individual ability.
This new approach means that Authentic matches can feel less predictable. The emphasis is on immersion and realism, making every pass, tackle, and goal feel more earned and meaningful.
Authentic Gameplay is an experience crafted for those who enjoy strategic football and want every match to feel like a true football story, shaped by your decisions and the ever-changing flow of the game.
For a deeper look at what makes Authentic Gameplay tick, you can jump into FC 26 Gameplay’s Pitch Notes, available here.
For those who want even more control, customising the sliders enables you to further personalise your experience, tweaking the balance of assistance and error across gameplay areas ranging from shooting to defensive actions.
You can now also create custom gameplay sliders using the Authentic slider values as your starting point. This enhancement gives you greater flexibility to tailor the game to your preferences, while maintaining the balance and feel of the authentic experience as your foundation.
Unexpected Events are a new layer of dynamic narrative scenarios that can occur throughout your Career Mode experience.
These events are designed to reflect the unpredictability of real-world football where, as a manager, things don’t always go to plan.
From sudden player injuries to surprise transfer offers, these moments will challenge your decision-making and adaptability as a manager.
The goal is to create a more immersive and authentic managerial experience. You’ll need to think on your feet, adjust your strategies, and sometimes make tough choices that could impact your club’s short-term and long-term success.
A System Where Your Decisions Really Matter
When an Unexpected Event is triggered, the game halts your current simulation and brings you directly into the moment with an event screen, complete with unique imagery and individualised narrative framing. These events aren’t background occurrences, they can have a major impact and sometimes even create crossroads in the narrative of your club.
Unexpected Events are meant to grab your attention and demand decisive action, but they never interrupt matches, post-match flows, or press conferences.
Types of Unexpected Events
These events are rooted in the uncontrollable elements of football, where not everything is in the manager’s hands.
In these scenarios, you don’t choose what happens, but you do choose how, or if, you respond, whether it’s a media rumor or a player expressing concern through the wrong channels.
How much attention you give them and what you do to deal with them can define you as a manager.
Unexpected Events are all about your influence on your club's story through your reactions, not the event itself.
In contrast, Decision Points place narrative control in your hands. These moments present a clear problem and require a decisive resolution.
Your choice isn’t about whether to act, but how you choose to act, and what values you bring to that decision.
For instance, one specific choice can result in a morale boost but weaken authority. Another might solve a short-term issue but create long-term consequences.
With Decision Points, you are driving the narrative of your career. They don’t just ask what you’ll do, they define who you’ll be.
There are several categories of Unexpected Events that you may encounter during your Career Mode playthrough:
How Unexpected Events affect the game:
Based on your feedback, we’ve been working on updating a number of existing features, including Youth, Scouting, Tactics, Live Start Points, and more.
In keeping with our continued commitment to authenticity, we’ve also expanded the number of leagues in Live Starting Points to over 20, providing many more opportunities for you to jump in at any point in the season.
Players will no longer be willing to renew their contracts at any time during their tenure at the club. They will instead reach out to you when they are open to begin talks on a new deal.
Some players will also express their unwillingness to renew their contract as they may want to pursue other opportunities. Not all of them will be willing to leave on a free transfer. Players will generally give you enough notice in advance to try and secure a deal for them that's also benefiting the club, while also giving you enough time to start scouting targets for potential replacements.
We have also tweaked AI clubs' behavior in terms of approaching players in the last six months of their contract to be more aggressive, reducing the number of situations in which valuable players are allowed to become free agents.
We also addressed a community-reported issue where players could remain active past the age of 50 by repeatedly renewing contracts.
We investigated community reports regarding the AI's poor decision-making process in defining a suitable lineup against you. We identified and improved on the following issues:
The importance of the match has a significant influence on how the lineup is created. Less important matches are more important for weaker players in the team, as it gives them a chance to play.
This is the logic that makes the AI put up a slightly weaker lineup in the early stages of a cup competition, or after they've clinched their league objectives, to give their stars a chance to rest. We addressed some instances where the algorithm was still favoring weaker players for critical and very important matches.
A player's current form also impacts the decision to include a player to make the lineup. A simplified explanation would be that an 80-rated striker in very good form could be deemed a better player to start than an 83-rated striker who is in bad form.
We took a better look at how form is calculated, and we identified that once a player dropped into very bad form, the criteria to make them break their bad spell were too restrictive. Thus, more players than expected ended up in poor form, which also meant they were less likely to be picked in the lineup.
We've noticed several mentions throughout the community that the AI could start hoarding players in specific positions on some occasions, and we investigated this issue thoroughly.
We identified that the reason for this change is that, despite making transfers in an area of the pitch, some transfers may not push the needle enough to improve that area to a level that would make the AI focus its attention elsewhere for improvements. This could have happened after multiple transfers in a row.
We added new logic that will stop the AI from shortlisting improvements in an area should there be an excessive surplus to requirements. The AI will start looking to improve the area only after selling some of the players, as removing the lower-quality players from an area can also contribute to improving it overall.
This also means that should some clubs have a significant surplus in all pitch areas, they will pause any attempts to purchase new players until they manage to offload some of them.
With this update, both you and AI clubs can now arrange loan deals for players who have just been purchased in the current transfer window. This is intended to add a new layer of flexibility and realism to squad management and player development.
As a big club, you can acquire young talent and immediately place them on the loan list, giving your prospects valuable playing time elsewhere while they continue to develop. Or if you’re managing a smaller club, you now have the opportunity to approach top teams and secure promising players on loan, even if they’ve just arrived at their new club. This opens up new pathways for building your squad and gives you access to emerging talent that might otherwise be out of reach.
This feature ensures that the transfer market remains dynamic and responsive, reflecting real-world strategies where clubs invest in youth and immediately seek the best environments for their growth. Whether you’re nurturing future stars or looking to strengthen your team with fresh talent, the ability to loan freshly bought players brings greater depth and authenticity to every Career Mode save.
We’ve revamped Tactical Vision so you can accurately recreate the way your favorite team plays or come up with a wild new approach that’s all your own. Want to try that Wing Play False 9 tactic, or see how Possession plays with a Poacher? You can now do it.
We’ve also renamed Tiki Taka and Gegenpressing to Possession and High Pressing, respectively, to reflect the evolution from the original relatively rigid philosophies into ones more permissive, flexible and widespread.
The new requirements for Tactical Visions are just the ones that are truly crucial for the Vision, no more than that. Standard has no requirements, since it is the basic way football is learned and played across the globe.
New tactical requirements on Build-Up Styles:
As for Defensive Approach:
No Tactical Vision requires both a Build-Up Style and a Defensive Approach to allow more flexibility and experimentation inside each Vision.
Player Roles are not requirements anymore either, so you can customise your tactical setup to your specific team and preference. Roles still get a boost from Head Coaches familiar with your Vision, so you can choose to stick with the tried and tested classics instead. For example, if you’re playing Possession you can have your Striker be a False 9 and get his Role Familiarity boosted by 1, up to False 9+ if your Head Coach is Silver, or up to False 9++ if your Head Coach is Gold, but you can have them be a Poacher instead with no penalty.
The number of Key Roles has also been expanded significantly to reflect the fact that every player on the pitch can be an integral part of the team. After all, some of football’s legendary defenders were just as creative as any midfielder or forward.
Along with the new roles in Box Crasher, Ball-Playing Keeper, and Inverted Wingback, the Wide Midfielder role has also been reworked to function more like a wingback.
Combined, all of these changes address some of the community’s concerns with the FC IQ system, bring the game closer to modern football’s constantly evolving nature, and opening a whole field of tactical possibilities and combinations for you to explore.
Manager Spotlight: New Cinematics and Animations
In FC26 Career Mode, we’re introducing dynamic new intro cinematics and touchline animations that highlight the actions and movements of the manager avatar. These enhancements bring a fresh perspective to gameplay, emphasizing the strategic and emotional presence of your manager around the pitch. Experience the thrill as your manager directs the team, reacts to key moments, and becomes a central figure in your football journey.
We’ve introduced Sharpness, Energy, and Training Plans to National Teams, bringing a new level of depth and strategy to international management.
Now, when players join up for national duty, you’ll need to actively manage their Training Plans to strike the right balance between Sharpness and Energy.
Sharpness directly impacts the Tactical Vision attribute boost your players receive. With National Team coaches recognised as experts in their fields, achieving high Sharpness can unlock significant attribute bonuses, making careful management more important than ever.
This update ensures that international fixtures are not just about squad selection, but also about preparing your team to perform at their peak. Plan your training carefully to maximise your squad’s potential and gain a crucial edge in the pursuit of international glory.
We’ve also added more options for customisation that you can earn from completing Live Challenges, including some highly anticipated retro kits, so you can make your club look just the way you want it. In Create Your Club you can also pick from one of the four charming new mascots to embody your club’s personality.
To navigate all these new features and improvements, we’ve made a new Switcher Menu that lets you quickly zip to exactly where you need to go. We know how much time is spent just going between the different Hubs and screens. We know how cumbersome that can be, and that there are community mods created to deal with exactly this issue, so we’ve altered the Switcher Menu to alleviate those issues.
It comes preloaded with the most common menus, and you can pin your most-used menu items and make the Switcher work for your specific taste.
We realised there was some community friction around accidental exits, so we made 2 changes:
Your scouts will now also consider player potential in the senior and youth talent scout reports, allowing you to assess your targets over a longer time frame.
We see that some of our Secondary Board Objectives have caused some frustration in recent years, so we decided to clean them up and keep focus on the Primary ones. We also revamped the Board Objectives screen accordingly.
Through Unexpected Events and Manager Live Restrictions, even the most hardcore players should be able to tailor an experience with just the right amount of challenge.
In the same way, we’ve refined the scenarios that previously led to immediate sacking. Actions such as signing players on excessively high wages, setting release clauses too low, or squad-wide morale issues will now result in a formal warning from the board rather than instant termination. This change is based on your feedback and aims to create a more balanced and less frustrating managerial experience.
We’ve addressed an issue where players were not correctly recognised for their secondary positions. Now, the out-of-position alert will no longer appear when a player is assigned to any of their preferred positions, ensuring more accurate squad management and a smoother experience.
To reduce frustration with persistent Renew Contract tasks, we’ve added a new option in the Squad Hub: Dismiss Contract Renewal. Now, you can remove contract renewal tasks for players you don’t intend to keep, helping you maintain a cleaner and more manageable task list in Career Mode.
We’ve added career progression timestamps directly to your save file tiles. Now, you can easily see the in-game date you’ve reached in your Career Mode before loading a save. This simple addition helps you keep track of your progress and quickly identify your most recent or advanced career saves, making it easier to manage multiple playthroughs.
We’ve expanded the range of injuries that can occur during matches by integrating a broader selection inspired by real-life football. Now, a wider array of injury types can be triggered in gameplay, adding more authenticity and unpredictability to every match. This enhancement deepens the challenge of squad management and brings your Career Mode experience even closer to the real-world game.
We know from your feedback that developing youth players and bringing them through to the first team is one of Manager Career's most satisfying features. To enhance that, we’ve added the ability to make substitutions during Youth Tournaments so you can adjust if a game isn’t going the way you want it.
Player development is the whole purpose of youth academies, and two crucial factors that determine the speed of a player’s development are match experience and form. Subbing players during Youth Tournaments can provide that match experience, and how well they play can provide the form they need to accelerate their development, making substitutions are a powerful tool for your youth team.
There are also two new Youth stadiums—a basic stadium and a top stadium—which provide a closer connection between your club's stature and your facilities. Big clubs can afford to invest more in their youth facilities, a fact now reflected visually in FC 26.
Any club with a worth of more than $500 million and 4.5 or 5 stars counts as a big club and will play their youth matches in the upgraded facilities.
Moreover, even the smallest club can grow to be the biggest in the world, so any club that meets the club worth and rating requirements, at the beginning of a season, can become a big club and use the Top Stadium. Now when you embark on your wonderkids-only, rags-to-riches save, you’ll see your progress reflected during gameplay, too.
We’ve introduced the Argentinian league to Career Mode, featuring its distinct competition structure with both Apertura and Clausura tournaments. Experience the excitement and challenges of managing in Argentina, as you navigate through both halves of the season just like in real life, with all the authenticity and unique dynamics of the league’s official format.
We’ve updated the UEFA Women’s Champions League to match the exciting new format of the competition, complete with the 18 team League Phase, new tiebreaker rules, and knockouts. It will also be playable in the Tournaments mode, and you’ll be able to customise the teams in each pot.
We noticed that the early days of each new Career can become quite swamped with tasks and emails that we felt were not all critical to your setup as a manager at your club. So we decided to make some changes there and create an entry flow that enables you to focus on things gradually, at your own pace.
Finally, we’ve also revamped the Tutorials. Given all the additions this year (and throughout the years), we know how important it is to help all players, both new and old, be exposed to all the small details and gears that make our systems tick.
These Tutorials have a new structure and format, guiding you through every new feature or mechanic, and through all the ones you may have missed. Using the UI from the game, they highlight exactly where all the information you need to succeed is as you develop your Career. They’re still accessible from the same menu as before whenever you need a refresher.
We’ve introduced support for recolorable circles in Social Media post texts, allowing these elements to automatically reflect team colors. Now, posts from Social Media Creators feature vibrant team-specific accents, inspired by real-life football media.
You can now set a Date of Birth for your manager during Avatar Creation
To keep you informed about new opportunities, you’ll now receive an inbox email every now and then when coaches available on the staff market have been refreshed. Since coaches are often a set-and-forget feature, this notification helps you remember that the staff market updates every two weeks.
FC 26 introduces exciting changes to Player Career, giving you greater control over your football journey and making progression more meaningful than ever.
Archetypes deliver a new progression system in FC 26. You’ll be able to unlock, progress, and develop 13 distinct player Archetypes, each inspired by an ICON of world football, and each built to give you options that fit your style of play.
Central to the revamped experience is the new Archetypes system, which offers a more personalised and strategic approach to player development, enabling you to shape your identity on the pitch and enjoy your Player Career, building with your own path, progressing with your own style.
Each of the Archetypes have Specialisations that allow narrowing down the area of expertise and influence further your avatar progression. Archetypes and Specialisations come with Gameplay Perks that help you make a difference on the pitch.
Each Archetype comes with its own strengths, weaknesses, and unique abilities, providing a foundation for specialising in your style of play. All of them are made with real-world football legends in mind.
For instance, you could opt for a pace-and-dribbling Archetype tailored for wingers who thrive on beating defenders, or a more physical Archetype suited for midfield enforcers and defenders focused on strength and positioning.
When starting your Player Career, your chosen Archetype will establish the groundwork for your attributes and growth trajectory. As your career unfolds, you’ll have opportunities to refine your Archetype, unlocking new abilities and making decisions that reflect your performance and play style.
This dynamic system is intended to make every Player Career feel unique and to encourage players to experiment with different Archetypes, adding depth and personalisation to the overall experience.
Training drills play an integral role in the Archetypes system, allowing you to hone skills that align with your chosen play style. Based on your Archetype, your manager will suggest specific drills that complement your strengths, but you’re free to choose exercises that better suit your preferences.
Performing well in these drills boosts your XP during matches, amplifying the experience gained from match events on the pitch and speeding up your development. The drills you select directly influence which match actions earn you the most XP, creating a strategic link between training and in-game performance.
With Origin Stories, we aimed to add new perspectives to Player Career and help players engage with new narrative elements. In FC 25, we delivered three paths, each with its own advantages and challenges. In FC 26, we’re bringing new improvements and stories to the table.
FC 26 brings in two new Origin Stories. Step into the shoes of a young player who has just been promoted from the academy, or put on the gloves of a goalkeeper to dominate the penalty area for your team. With the gameplay improvements and the addition of specific Goalkeeper Archetypes, we took the opportunity to highlight this specific scenario and bring it to life with its own specific narrative.
With the addition of the new stories, we also polished and reviewed the ones prepared for FC 25 and decided to keep two of the most well-received ones, giving players a total of four stories and perspectives to play through in FC 26
All of the Origin Stories prepared for FC 26 have been linked with Archetypes to provide a coherent experience intended to support the narrative, alongside specific Social Media stories and Activities to enhance the experience and make each playthrough a different story.
We’ve also retained the option for you to create your own story base for your Career. You can use the Custom Story to set up your starting conditions, such as your Level, Personality Type and Age. You can also pick whatever Archetype will fit the narrative you have planned for your game.
And if you wish to start from the perspective of a young player that you can develop from the start, with no frills, bells or whistles, you can always select the Clean Slate option and build a player from the ground up.
Whichever option you choose, remember that it will define your save and cannot be changed on the fly, so if you want to experiment with a new story, you’ll have to go create a new save.
Thanks for taking the time to read these Pitch Notes. Your passion for EA SPORTS FC is unmatched and we can’t wait to see the new stories you’ll write in FC 26 Career Mode.
If you have any feedback, be sure to share in our official EA SPORTS FC Feedback Hub: ea.com/fcfeedback.
-The EA SPORTS FC Career Mode Team
Until you add the ability to add/remove/develop/lose playstyles, the in-game career mode experience will always be lacking. Real-life youth stars without playstyles will never be good in-game with no way to develop them. Star players missing a key play style have no way to develop into your perfect player. And we’re forced to prioritize 14 year olds who somehow already have 7 playstyles as the only path to developing elite players, It’s ridiculously unrealistic please fix this.
