Man, it's completely natural because the game is literally programmed this year to sync defensive players with the ball carrier.
This means that as soon as you receive the ball, the game will deliberately slow down your player—even if he’s extremely fast, he will become slow for a while so the game can quickly set up the defensive scenario and let the defenders take the ball from you easily.
Everything is scripted—clear scripts. You can even see it in how they develop the game. When they show you an image with a red player and a blue player, those are specific in-game situations that they tweak in a certain way to create pre-set scenarios.
What’s worse is that they now control the ball carrier. They’ve become more shameless than ever—it’s more blatant now. They actively manipulate the ball carrier’s abilities, making him feel heavy, slow, unable to turn, unable to dribble. Even skill moves and dribbling animations are noticeably slowed down.
The simplest example of this is in Squad Battles. Try playing on the highest difficulty (Ultimate) against bronze players. You’ll see how the game drastically slows down your fast players, while these bronzes can easily keep up with you as if there’s no difference in stats at all.
You’ll also notice that they increase your team’s passing errors significantly, while the AI’s passing becomes nearly flawless—not a single mistake, even though they’re just bronze players!
That’s why this game is terrible—full of errors, input delay, scripting, unresponsive controls, player sluggishness—every possible bad thing you can think of.
Even the so-called "pro players" they feature in tournaments all play the exact same way—just spamming the X button and doing ground passes the whole time. They all play alike, the same repetitive style.
Honestly, this game is embarrassing.
