Warning to Parents

Children (12 and under) can only play on a guest account and cannot link their FC Mobile User ID to any service to save their EA FC Mobile progress.   If the locally stored game file becomes corrupt, then all progress is lost.

EA justifies its decision to offer no save facility to children by reference to data protection laws whereby minors cannot legally give digital consent (Privacy and Cookie Policy - Official EA Site).  While parents can create an 'EA Child Account', it is not possible to link EA FC Mobile to that child account.

Now one might think that with that being the case, these would be sensible steps to take:

1. Take a note of the child's User ID so that EA Support team can restore progress:  no, this doesn't work if the account is unlinked any the support team will happily tell you that there's nothing they can do if you were silly enough not to link their account, despite the fact that it's impossible to link an account.
2. Back up your phone / tablet regularly so that you can restore the device and get all progress back:  this doesn't work, it simply loads EA FC Mobile as if you had downloaded it for the first time
3. Add your child as a friend, so that when the save inevitably becomes corrupt you can easily take a screenshot of their team, so that EA Support will helpfully restore the missing players: no, EA Support says they don't have the tools to do that and instead will tell you that you're silly for not linking, despite the fact that it's impossible to do so

Both of my kids have now lost all of their progress, all of their real money purchases and hours of their time.  My son is a football fan and is distraught.  He feels cheated.  He feels let down by unhelpful support staff and feels unfairly treated by EA, who should be doing more to prevent this problem, which from what I have read, has been going on for years.

While EA itself would never say this, a workaround is to fabricate the child's date of birth to make them appear over 18 but by doing so, you open them up unsuitable features such as unmoderated chat (in leagues) and the cancer that is Tapjoy (which itself settled with the FTC on charges of deceptive business practices ) . Also, it's against the terms of service and overall just not the right solution for young kids.

So fellow parents, it leaves a difficult conundrum, do you gamble and hope your locally stored save file won't become corrupt, do you breach the terms of service and lie about your child's age or do you simply just avoid the whole hassle in the first place. 

If you are unlucky enough to be reading this because it happened to you:  While I don't know about Google, Apple will refund in-game purchases if you explain that it was impossible to back-up your game on account of EA's policies.