Player career is fundamentally broken, espacially for the magician archetype

I am writing this after trying to make EA SPORTS FC 26 Player Career work across three separate long-term careers. At this point, I am seriously considering abandoning the mode entirely.

This is not about one isolated bug, one bad match, or one feature I personally dislike. My experience has been a chain of systems that either do not work as intended, contradict each other, or actively punish long-term progression.

I have spent an absurd amount of time trying to work around these problems myself. I adjusted gameplay sliders, CPU behavior, difficulty, player development, personality distribution and even the way I play matches. Every time I managed to work around one problem, another system eventually made the career either unrealistic or fundamentally broken.

Career #1 – I spent several seasons effectively balancing the game myself

My first career lasted roughly five seasons. A huge part of that career was spent adjusting sliders because the match balance was completely unsuitable for a long-term Player Career.

As my player and team became stronger, results increasingly became absurd. Matches ending 5–7 or with similarly ridiculous scorelines were not exceptional anymore. My player could accumulate around 120 goal contributions in a season.

I did not want that. I wanted a career where progression mattered, strong opponents were difficult, weaker opponents could occasionally be dominated, and 50–60 goal contributions would feel like an exceptional season rather than something I had to artificially restrict myself to.

Instead, I effectively became the game’s balancing department.

I repeatedly changed sliders to try to make matches believable. Settings that seemed reasonable at one club or stage of development could become completely inappropriate later. Strong teams could become absurdly dominant, while other configurations produced constant goal festivals.

Eventually I abandoned the career because I was spending more time trying to balance EA’s game than simply playing it.

Career #2 – OVR/position logic and the broken Magician archetype

I then started another career and played it for a long time.

My player became an elite attacking player, produced enormous numbers of goals and assists, played for Real Madrid and had previously represented Germany successfully.

Then the game internally changed/treated his position differently after a transfer. His OVR dropped because FC’s overall-rating calculation is heavily position-dependent, despite the player himself obviously not suddenly becoming a worse footballer.

The consequences went beyond a cosmetic number.

He stopped being selected for Germany.

This was a player who had already played for the national team and performed extremely well, was starting for Real Madrid and was producing elite numbers. Yet an internal position/OVR issue appeared to outweigh his actual performances.

That alone severely damaged the career.

Then I discovered something even worse that I had somehow not noticed earlier: my Magician archetype did not actually have the expected Magician PlayStyles.

I had assumed they would unlock later as I progressed. They did not.

I subsequently tested this with multiple newly created careers.

Different attacking and midfield archetypes – including Magician and several others – were repeatedly receiving what appeared to be the same or incorrect PlayStyle trees. Meanwhile some archetypes in other positions did produce different trees, showing that this was not simply me misunderstanding how archetypes work.

Most importantly, newly created Magician players were missing expected abilities such as Finesse Shot, despite the entire identity and description of the archetype being built around a highly technical, creative attacking player.

I even had an older Player Career save using Magician which did have the correct Finesse Shot PlayStyle, demonstrating that the behavior differed between older and newly created careers.

So I abandoned another long-term player after discovering that the archetype I had selected apparently did not actually contain its intended progression.

Career #3 – I deliberately designed around the bugs, and the personality system is now destroying that career too

This is the part that has finally made me question why I should continue playing Player Career at all.

For my third career, I already knew about the Magician/archetype problem.

I therefore accepted in advance that the archetype might be broken. I accepted that I probably would never receive the gold PlayStyle I originally wanted. I also knew from previous experience and community reports how difficult reaching the 65% personality requirement could be.

So instead of expecting the system to eventually work, I deliberately created my player with a personality distribution that already gave me the normal Maverick PlayStyles I wanted with 60.000 points in the personality system and 60% Maverick.

In other words, I designed the player around FC 26’s broken systems before I even started playing.

After roughly 1.5 seasons, that has already fallen to approximately 56%.

I then manually added my personality points because I wanted to understand what was happening.

My player currently has 68,671 total personality points.

This revealed another major problem: personality points apparently continue accumulating beyond 60,000. Therefore the personality distribution does not eventually freeze. It can continue changing throughout the career.

This is catastrophic because normal personality-based PlayStyles require the player to currently maintain the required percentage. If the percentage falls below the threshold, those PlayStyles can become unavailable again.

Therefore the PlayStyles I deliberately built my player around are now effectively on a countdown.

And here is the most important problem:

I cannot realistically prevent it through gameplay.

My player is a CAM/number 10 using the Magician archetype. His job is to create chances, combine with teammates, pass, dribble, assist and score.

Yet normal match actions distribute so many points into Teamwork and Discipline that maintaining a high Maverick percentage becomes practically impossible.

I tested this extensively.

I deliberately played matches in an absurd way specifically to maximize Maverick points. I avoided passing, repeatedly dribbled opponents, performed skill moves, made solo runs and scored goals.

Even then, the game awarded huge amounts of points to the other personalities.

In one extreme test where I essentially did nothing except dribble, perform skills, make solo runs and score long-range goals, the match awarded approximately:

Maverick: 192 points
Discipline: 181 points
Teamwork: 48 points

That is 192 maverick points versus 229 combined points for the other two personalities, despite intentionally playing in an absurd manner designed almost exclusively to generate maverick.

One match objective alone awarded approximately 100 Discipline points.

By comparison, multiple solo runs and successful dribbles awarded relatively small amounts of maverick.

Passing makes the situation even worse. Successful passes – which are literally one of the fundamental responsibilities of a CAM/playmaker – generate significant personality points outside maverick.

So what exactly am I supposed to do?

Stop passing?

Stop creating chances?

Ignore teammates?

Put the game on an easy difficulty and dribble around opponents hundreds of times simply to stop my footballer from losing abilities he already possesses?

And even that does not solve the underlying mathematical problem, because the total personality pool continues increasing.

The game is effectively punishing my Magician playmaker for playing like a Magician playmaker.

This is not meaningful progression. It is a permanently moving percentage requirement that can eventually remove abilities from a player because he became more complete as a footballer.

A young player can have a PlayStyle at 18, become better at passing and teamwork over several seasons, and then lose that technical ability because his personality distribution changed from 50% to 49%.

That makes absolutely no sense as football progression.

The 65% PlayStyle+ requirement makes the contradiction even worse

Reaching 65% in one personality is already extraordinarily difficult when normal football actions constantly award points to several categories.

The optimal strategy is therefore not necessarily to play good football.

It is to manipulate the personality system.

A creative playmaker can effectively be punished for passing because passing may make it harder to reach the personality percentage required for the PlayStyle+ associated with his archetype.

Think about what that means from a game-design perspective:

A system designed to represent a player’s football identity can require the player to stop playing according to that football identity in order to unlock it.

The Magician archetype is presented as a creative, technically gifted attacker capable of creating for himself and teammates. Yet the personality progression can incentivize avoiding the exact team-oriented actions a creative number 10 should constantly perform.

That is completely contradictory.

Personality should not determine whether a footballer remembers how to perform football techniques

The underlying design needs reconsideration.

Personality should primarily affect narrative and behavioral elements: interviews, media reactions, relationships, captaincy, transfer situations, reputation, etc.

Football abilities should primarily come from:

• archetype
• attributes
• development
• player level

If personality is going to interact with PlayStyles, it could unlock additional slots or accelerate certain development paths.

But once a football ability has been learned, it should not disappear because a continuously changing personality percentage falls below an arbitrary threshold.

Alternatively, reaching 25%, 50% or 65% should permanently unlock the associated PlayStyles. The requirement should be an unlock condition, not a permanent maintenance requirement.

A better system would allow archetypes to provide an appropriate pool of PlayStyles, with attribute requirements determining which ones can be equipped. Personality could influence how quickly slots or PlayStyle+ upgrades become available.

This would allow players to create actual footballers instead of trying to manipulate three percentages.

There are also serious problems with match AI and CPU behavior

During these careers I have also spent countless hours adjusting gameplay and CPU settings because opponent behavior can vary wildly.

I have experienced elite teams such as Bayern or Manchester City becoming bizarrely passive: slowly circulating possession, barely attacking and sometimes producing only a handful of shots over an entire match.

Meanwhile considerably weaker teams can suddenly become dramatically more aggressive and difficult.

I have had to experiment with Tactical vs Dynamic CPU behavior and gameplay sliders simply to make elite opponents behave like elite opponents.

Changing CPU behavior can then create the opposite problem: opponents finally attack, but defensive behavior becomes too weak and matches become too easy to score in.

This should not require constant manual balancing by the player.

Player Career should account for club strength, player quality, tactics and progression well enough that moving from Freiburg to Real Madrid – or developing from an average prospect into an elite player – does not require rebuilding the slider configuration every season.

Fouls are another example

Across multiple careers and many seasons, free kicks and penalties have been extraordinarily rare. I have played enormous numbers of matches while receiving almost no dangerous free kicks and virtually no penalties.

Again, the proposed solution becomes adjusting referee settings and CPU tackle aggression manually – with inconsistent results.

I should not have to tune CPU tackle aggression simply to experience a normal number of fouls in a football game.

Transfer objectives are frequently disconnected from the player’s role

My current CAM was given a transfer requirement involving roughly 70 successful tackles.

Why?

Why is a creative attacking midfielder’s potential transfer dependent on farming dozens of tackles?

Objectives could actually be an excellent way to encourage player development. A coach could ask an attacking midfielder to create a certain number of chances, improve weak-foot usage, successfully perform specific dribbles, score from outside the box, improve pressing, complete progressive passes, etc.

Instead, arbitrary objectives can encourage players to manipulate matches purely to satisfy counters that have little connection to their role.

National-team selection also feels excessively dependent on OVR rather than performance

This became especially obvious in my second career, when an internal position/OVR change coincided with a previously successful international player disappearing from national-team selection despite elite club performances.

In my current career I again find myself deliberately thinking about which attributes increase CAM OVR fastest – not necessarily because those are the abilities I most want to develop, but because I know actual performances may not be sufficient for international selection.

That is backwards.

Performance, form, club level and positional competition should matter substantially.

The result of all of this

I have now attempted Player Career three times.

Career 1: abandoned after several seasons because I spent much of the career constantly adjusting sliders while matches became ridiculous goal festivals and my player could produce around 120 goal contributions per season.

Career 2: abandoned after a position/OVR issue damaged my rating and national-team selection, followed by discovering that my Magician archetype did not even have the expected Magician PlayStyles.

Career 3: created specifically to work around everything I had already learned was broken. I accepted the Magician bug. I accepted that I probably would not obtain the desired 65% PlayStyle+. I deliberately started with a personality distribution giving me the normal PlayStyles I wanted.

Now I have discovered that even those PlayStyles are not safe because personality points continue accumulating beyond 60,000, my Freigeist/Maverick percentage has already fallen from approximately 60% to 56% in 1.5 seasons, and playing normal football makes that decline effectively impossible to prevent.

I am playing on PS4, so PC tools such as Live Editor are obviously not a solution.

At this point, I genuinely do not know why I should invest another 50–100 hours into this career when the game’s progression system is already telling me that abilities central to my build may eventually become unavailable through no meaningful mistake or decision of my own.

That is the fundamental issue.

A long-term career mode requires trust in long-term progression.

I need to know that developing my player for ten seasons will make him a more complete version of the footballer I created – not that another hidden interaction between OVR, position, archetypes, personality percentages or PlayStyle requirements will eventually destroy the build.

I want to play football.

I do not want to spend every season reverse-engineering personality mathematics, testing archetype bugs, manipulating transfer objectives, optimizing OVR formulas, farming personality actions and continuously rebalancing CPU sliders just to keep the career functional.

Please seriously review Player Career’s archetype/PlayStyle assignment, personality-point distribution, permanent PlayStyle unlock logic, position/OVR behavior, national-team selection, transfer objectives and long-term gameplay balancing.

There is a genuinely enjoyable career mode buried underneath these systems.

But after three attempts, the mode has repeatedly punished me for investing time in it.

At some point the player stops looking for another workaround and simply stops playing.