Totally agree with a lot of what you wrote those are exactly the kind of granular options a lot of us want. I also want to be straight with you about why we haven’t seen a big, one stop “Create/Edit overhaul” yet. It’s not that the feature isn’t valuable; it’s that a whole bunch of real constraints make a big rebuild expensive, risky, and slow. I’ll walk through the main reasons and point to the places where the community can push for changes.
1) EA didn’t just keep the same backend and UI forever they’ve moved large parts of the player creation pipeline onto newer tech (the Frostbite based tooling and the new “Cranium” character tech EA introduced). That’s great long term because it lets them make much better, more realistic heads/animations, but it also means older systems (like the old webbased “Game Face”) either had to be rewritten or retired. Rewriting takes engineering time and artists to reauthor assets so they work correctly in the new pipeline. Cranium is an explicit investment in this area it shows the team is working on better creation tech, but that work isn’t an instant feature toggle.
2) A studio has finite engineering/art/QA capacity. Historically EA has focused much of its live service engineering and design on the parts of the game that drive the biggest engagement and revenue (Ultimate Team and core gameplay), because those systems fund the franchise and pay for long term investments. That doesn’t excuse slow progress on Career/creation tools, but it does explain why a big overhaul isn’t always the top priority in a given year. You can see EA publicly talking about big Career Mode improvements for FC26 which is a sign that priorities do shift when the studio hears the community but those shifts still have to compete with other work.
3) EA FC ships on multiple platforms (console + PC + mobile variants historically). Any change to player creation (new clothing layers, tattoos, accessory colors, new hairstyles, photo upload, etc.) must be implemented, tested and supported across every platform and every variation of the engine. That multiplies QA time massively. Bugs that look trivial in a single PC build can cause desyncs, visual glitches, or performance drops on consoles. Those extra test/bugfix cycles are a real cost and slow the rollout of large editor changes.
4) Some of the community argument is “just add generic teams / tools and let players mod or edit them.” On PC that helps a lot, but console players who make up a huge portion of the EA audience don’t get the same mod ecosystem. Console mod support is limited, platform permissions are restrictive, and curated user generated content systems require backend, curation and moderation work. Relying on the mod community would leave many players and entire platforms without the experience you’re asking for.
5) Requests like “Adidas/Nike gloves or club logo gloves” aren’t just art work they often require brand licensing. License owners (brands, leagues, federations) control how their logos and assets are used. That’s why some teams, kits, or branded accessories have historically been left out or made generic: the legal deal either wasn’t available or was too complicated/costly. The same goes for player likeness rights in different countries there are real legal reasons certain squads or player images are handled differently.
6) If EA allowed arbitrary player photo uploads or unfettered tattoo/skin imports, they’d have to invest in content moderation, safety tooling, and enforcement pipelines (to stop hate speech, copyrighted images, or personally identifying content). EA already publishes its moderation and Positive Play commitments those safeguards exist for good reasons, and they add engineering and human-review costs if you open more UGC channels. That’s one reason full “upload any face” or unfiltered GameFace style tools can’t come back overnight without extra investment.
Many of these requests are straightforward in scope but still expensive in practice. A few concrete examples from your list and why they’re not just a tiny checkbox:
Cold weather gear / undershorts / compression pants / varying undershirt and short lengths: that means extra clothing layers, new art assets, new shader/texturing rules, additional animation/test coverage (things like clipping are notorious), and additional slot logic (what shows/what hides when). All that per platform.
Wrist/ankle tape colour parity and the accessory colour wheel: bugs like “accessory colour not matching away kit” are real and often fixable — but require careful changes to the rendering/color pipeline and then regression testing (and sometimes backend edits to ensure presets don’t break online synchronisation). The community already files these as bugs and they do get tracked, but fixes can sit behind higher-priority patches. (There are live forum threads reporting accessory color/brand mismatches.)
Tattoos on both arms / sleeve tattoos / large tattoo library / matching left/right options: that’s not only about adding images — it’s UV-map work, skin shader work, morph compatibility with Cranium head shapes, and animation testing so tattoos don’t stretch or pop when a player runs/celebrates.
Editable Potential / Composure / PlayStyles: these fields are tied into the game’s balance (offline simulation, online stats, FUT card generation, matchmaking). Letting players arbitrarily change them creates balancing/exploit risks that ripple across multiple modes so adding these safely requires careful design and server side guards or offline/online separation.
There are signs EA is listening and investing.
This is important: the company has publicly shown investment in better creation tech (Cranium) and has been explicitly talking about Career Mode improvements in FC26 pitch notes (new Manager Live, Authentic gameplay, deeper simulation, etc.). That indicates the team is aware and is making incremental progress it’s just being paced against other work and the realities above. If you want these features prioritised, the right lever is the official feedback channels EA points to its FC Feedback hub and the Career Mode Pitch Notes are a clear signal they read community input.
