Multiple career mode bugs

1. Career Mode Initialization Issues

• Live Starting Point Ratings: When starting a new career from a live starting point, all players have an average match rating of 0.00. This skews dynamic potential calculations, making it nearly impossible to maintain realistic player growth. This issue persisted from EAFC 25 and remains unresolved.
• Youth Scout Updates: Youth scouts do not refresh weekly after starting from a live starting point. You have to hire one, that you don't want, remove him and hope that a new one fitting your budget or intentions appears.
• Clean Sheet Data Bug: Outfield players are incorrectly listed in the clean sheet overview. Only goalkeepers should appear in this stat category.

2. Gameplay Balance and Realism

• Difficulty Tuning: Despite the improved authentic gameplay feel that I really enjoy, Ultimate difficulty is far too easy. AI lacks competitiveness, making career mode incentiveless right away.
• Injury Simulation: Injuries are virtually nonexistent—even with sliders adjusted.
• AI Aggression and Fouls: AI teams rarely commit fouls. After a full season on 5 minute games, only three free kicks were awarded to me, none near the goal area.
• Goalkeeper Selection: Opponent teams frequently field backup goalkeepers, even in key matches. This occurs roughly every fourth game.

3. Transfer and Contract System Flaws

• Wage Budget Visibility: The wage budget is no longer shown during transfer negotiations, making financial planning difficult when near the limit.
• Contract Negotiation Notification Failure: Players are supposed to notify managers when ready to negotiate contracts—but they don’t. Instead, players are auto-listed for transfer without warning, sometimes leaving before any action can be taken.
• Exit Clauses: Players with exit clauses cannot have them removed until they’re open to negotiations. This often results in unintended departures.
• Assistant Transfer Handling: If contract negotiations are missed, the assistant manager takes over transfer talks—but consistently fails to secure deals.
• Player Potential: I played every single game of a season, overperformed with a bad team (winning almost every game) but still most of my younger players got a downgrade in potential (If they played a lot or not did not have much of an impact). I suspect the match rating beeing to bad, because of substitutions?
• Target List Limitations:
  • When scouting players, the game now shows a potential range during the search phase, which is very helpful! However, once a player is added to your target list, this potential range is nowhere to be seen. This forces users to re-search for the same player just to retrieve information they already had.
  • After sorting the target list by attributes (e.g., overall rating, position, age), if you remove a player while sorted, the cursor doesn’t move to the next logical entry—it jumps randomly to another player, often far from the one you just removed. For example, if you're reviewing center backs and remove one, the cursor might jump to a striker at the bottom of the list. This disrupts workflow and makes managing large scouting lists really frustrating.

4. User Interface and Navigation

• Career Mode Access: The process of continuing or loading an existing career save is unnecessarily hard. Currently, users must navigate through multiple layers: first selecting Career Mode, then choosing the original option, followed by using the right stick to scroll through different options—all of which lead to the same submenu. Only then can you access the “Load Save” option. This is inefficient and frustrating, especially for players who primarily continue existing careers rather than starting new ones. A more intuitive design would place the “Continue” and “Load Career” options directly on the first screen, ideally mapped to one of the right stick shortcuts for immediate access.
• Manager Name Setup: The new manager market feature is a welcome addition. However, the implementation is extremely tedious. To assign a name, you must enter the club settings, input the name, save, exit, and then navigate through several menus again to locate the next club. This repetitive process becomes exhausting when updating multiple teams. Worse, all custom entries are wiped after each squad update, meaning users must redo the entire setup from scratch. This discourages engagement with what could be a nice thing.

5. National Teams and Tournament Bugs

• World Cup Setup and National Team Representation: The World Cup mode is severely underdeveloped. Many national teams are missing entirely, and EA could easily include unlicensed versions using basic kits and national flags—similar to how unlicensed club teams like AC Milan are handled. The data already exists within the game via youth academy locations, so the infrastructure is there.
• Player Data Issues: In the data of the world cup, a lot of players don't have their national team shown, also they stats are wrong.
• Season Transition Bug: Players retire from club football during tournaments due to season transitions, causing them to disappear from national squads mid-competition.