EA FC 25 devs talk the women's game, Live Start Points and adding social media trolling to career mode

EA FC 25, as I mentioned in my earlier preview, is full of subtle on-the-pitch updates - but off the pitch, there’s a whole lot to cover. While Ultimate Team will likely still get many players through the door, it’s Career Mode that’s arguably getting the biggest overhaul it’s seen in years.

With a whole clutch of features that could have felt like headline additions in prior years, I traveled to EA Romania in Bucharest to speak to Alex Constantinescu, Principal Game Designer, and Andreas Wilsdorf, Line Producer about everything coming this year - from the inclusion of a women’s career mode, to the live starting points feature and more.

The Women's Game

EA has added women’s football in the last couple of years, with last year seeing players from some of the biggest leagues making their debut in Ultimate Team. This time around, the women’s game is coming to career mode, not as a standalone mode but as one, all-encompassing one that will let players switch between managerial jobs at men’s and women’s teams. Still, the women’s game works differently to the men’s one.

“I think there’s multiple things [differences]. One is a bigger focus on youth In the women’s game, like you see a lot of women’s teams have have 16 year old players,” Wilsdorf explains, pointing to the new Youth Squad feature debuting in this year’s game alongside 5v5 Rush mode for playing youth tournaments.

"The other one is that the transfer market is much harder, even in the real world when you think about it - there are a few star players and every year you see the the top leagues and the top teams bidding for those players.

"So you will see the same star players getting the offers and have a tough time keeping the star players, leading to investing more in your youth team. Am I bringing in more youth or am I looking for the next talent maybe in some of the leagues?"

But what prompted the addition of women’s career this time around? Constantinescu explains why it was the “right time”.

“For us it was basically the right time to deliver women in football in career mode, mostly based around the amount of licenses that we were able to pull off. So for us, it was very clear that by the time we’re going to get four or five leagues in the game, that’s when we could actually get started on thinking about it because we wanted to see an active transfer window,” he explained.

“We didn’t want it to be just a tournament mode with a lack of competition and a lack of scouting options,” he adds, saying the inclusion of five top leagues and the Women’s Champions League offers a “compelling experience”.

A fresh starting point

Whether you opt for a male or female career mode, in Player or Manager mode, you’ll have new tools this time around to customize your experience. I’ve already covered the ‘Simulation’ settings in another piece, but you’ll now be able to adjust the starting point of your career mode journey.

On one hand, player career will let players pick their opening stats right off the bat, or opt for one of three origin stories. The desire to skip ahead was inspired, at least in part, by World of Warcraft, Constantinescu revealed.

For either mode, though, players can pick new “Live Starting Points”, which will roll out over the course of a season. These will update your chosen league with the correct stats and positions for each time, letting an Arsenal fan try to avoid bottling the league, or a player take control of Jadon Sancho and try to win the Champions League after moving in January.

It’s all in aid of making Career Mode drastically more flexible and malleable, and Wilsdorf explains there’s plenty to do.

"You can customize things, like for example, make your development rate faster [for younger players] or impose a transfer embargo on yourself, if you want.

“These settings can even customize the starting point, so even though it has real world data, you can change things for yourself to challenge yourself.”

Longtime career mode fans can even turn off additional features that have felt a little tedious in recent years, meaning you can remove training entirely, while a new customizable ‘Advance’ button, paired with a new task list, mean you can be kept informed of whatever you choose, or just skip straight to matches.

While Constantinescu explains you can’t do anything to rival teams (my dreams of dishing out a points deduction to Manchester City will have to wait), that’s being “taken into consideration”.

“Live starting points for us is a, say, toe in the water when it comes to live service and how we can evolve career mode throughout the year,” he explains.

“So we’re really connected to taking the current progress from the real world and using that data to create content,” he adds, pointing to the new Snapshot option that’ll be front-and-centre in the game’s menus this time around. These play out like curated scenarios, like avoiding an injury crisis to win the league.

Even these are flexible, too - players can take charge of a battered and bruised team and try to patch together a team capable of winning the title, or they can switch injuries off for their very own “what if” moment.

If you’re wondering how these live service ambitions will affect Ultimate Team, don’t worry - players will still have plenty to do in the card-collecting, pack-opening mode.

“We’re not competing with Ultimate Team or any other game mode within EA FC,” Constantinescu explains. "We have a very passionate career mode community that has been talking to us about how they used to feel abandoned after launch.

“Okay, maybe we do some tweaks here and there through patches and through some improvements, but they always got to see campaigns in Ultimate team like St Patrick’s, the Futties, Team of the Year. Live Starting Points are our answer to that.”

“You always have that ‘armchair coach’ moment of like ‘I could do it better’”, Wilsdorf adds. “Now you can really go into that moment and see if you can do it better from that point.”

Here we go!

One of the most surprising additions for this year’s career mode is a deeper emphasis of social media, with the likes of transfer guru Fabrizio Romano and The Athletic’s social media accounts represented in the game, catchphrases and all.

While their posts in-game will feel in keeping with their professional tone, the team has worked on a series of random comments from other accounts that range from conversational to tongue-in-cheek trolling.

“One of the reasons we had so much fun with social media, and one of the reasons we wanted to convert from the traditional news outlet delivery of messages about what’s happening in the football world before was that we don’t have to keep a serious tone always. Social media gives you this opportunity to be a bit more fun to break the norm a bit and make it feel authentic,” Constantinescu explains.

“You wouldn’t expect, you know, the massive media outlets to start trolling and to start sending out these type of puns and whatnot, but the comments section? Well, that’s a different beast.”

“You sell your best striker, and then you read the comments and some are angry at it, some are fine, then you see the famous “oh no, anyway” meme,” Wilsdorf adds.

Constantinescu recalls seeing a screenshot from the closed beta where Romano had posted about Harry Maguire moving from Manchester United to Lille.

"One of the [in-game] comments was “this is disappointing, when are the big transfers going to happen?”

For more on EA FC 25, be sure to check out my preview of Career mode after a few hours, a deeper dive into the Simulation settings, and how it’s fixing one of my biggest issues with the season pass.