Roles are broken, and have consistently gotten worse

I want to raise an issue with the current Roles system, especially with wingers and falsebacks.

I know the Roles system isn’t new. This is now the third year we’ve had it. However, I honestly feel like it has got considerably worse in FC 27.

I already didn’t think the Roles system in the previous two games gave you anywhere near the same level of freedom as the old tactical system, but this year it’s become really noticeable how little control you actually have over your own team.

The biggest problem I’m having is with my wingers.

I want my wingers to stay high and wide, stretch the opposition and give me a proper outlet on the touchline. I’ve put them on the Winger role for exactly that reason, but they constantly drift inside. Sometimes they end up so narrow that they’re practically playing alongside my striker.

That’s not how I want my team to play, and it’s incredibly frustrating that I can’t seem to make them stay wide.

What’s even more annoying is that I can play against the CPU and their wingers will stay high and wide perfectly well. So it’s not as if the game can’t produce the behaviour I’m looking for. I just don’t seem to have the control over my own players to make them do it consistently.

I’m also having the same problem with falsebacks.

I select the Falseback role because I want my fullbacks to move inside into midfield when we’re in possession. That’s literally the reason I’m selecting the role. But they regularly just stay out wide and behave like normal fullbacks.

Again, I’ve selected a role because I want a specific tactical behaviour, but the player doesn’t consistently do what the role is supposed to do.

And this is where my biggest problem with the Roles system comes in.

In the older FIFA/FC games, I could actually build my team to play the way I wanted. I could control things like whether my wingers stayed wide or came inside, what kind of runs they made, whether fullbacks overlapped, where players positioned themselves defensively, who stayed back, who pushed forward, and so on.

I could basically build my own tactical system.

Now it feels like I’m selecting a Role and then relying on the game’s AI to decide what that Role actually means in a match.

If I want my winger to stay wide, I should be able to tell him to stay wide.

If I want my fullback to invert into midfield, I should be able to tell him to invert into midfield.

I shouldn’t have to pick a Role and then hope the AI decides to interpret it in the way I intended.

I’m not necessarily saying the Roles system needs to be completely removed. I think it could work alongside the old individual instructions. Let Roles act as presets for people who want a simpler system, while still allowing players who want to build their own tactics to override them.

That’s what I feel is missing now: freedom.

The previous system gave me the ability to create a team that played football in the way I wanted. The Roles system, even though it’s now been around for three years, has never given me that same level of control. FC 27 has made that problem considerably worse because even some of the basic behaviours that the Roles are supposed to provide aren’t happening consistently.

I genuinely don’t understand why the game moved away from giving players that level of control.

I’m not asking the game to play the match for me. I’m asking it to let me build my own team and actually have my players follow the tactics I’ve given them.