EA Sports FC 25 features smarter players, 5-on-5 matches, intentional fouls, and more
7.17.2024
By Julian Benson, Contributor
We got a peek at EA Sports FC 25 ahead of release and picked out the features you most need to know about. Below, you’ll find details on the new machine learning-powered tactics system, a five-a-side game type that appears in all of EA Sports FC 25's main modes, a dirty new move that will infuriate your opposition (and that's lifted straight from real-world pitches), and an update to Career mode that captures the tension and drama of the current football season.
Whether you’re new to the series or have been playing for years, here’s everything you need to know about EA Sports FC 25 ahead of its release on September 27, 2024.
Rush
EA Sports FC 25 marks the end of Volta—the fast-paced 11-on-11 mode that tried to get closer to the experience of street football by eliminating systems like substitutions, offsides, and yellow and red cards. Replacing Volta in EA Sports FC 25 is Rush.
Whereas Volta played like regular EA Sports FC with fewer rules, Rush radically differs from a regular game. To start with, it’s more compact. Rush is a 5-on-5 game on a smaller pitch with reduced game time. In most cases, all of the players are human-controlled except for an AI-controlled goalie. This makes for faster, more intense matches and means you’ll have more meaningful time on the ball.
At first glance, Rush seems like a casual mode that aims to make football games faster and more spectacular, similar to games like Rocket League and Mario Strikers. It even has a similar aesthetic, with colorful outfits and pitchside flame cannons. However, there’s currently no way to load Kylian Mbappé up with red shells or fit him with rocket-powered boots.
While there aren’t any superpowers, Rush isn’t just five-a-side with more confetti. There are myriad rule tweaks that make for a unique game. Match time is reduced to just seven minutes (with no separate halves), the offside rule only applies in the opposition’s back-third of the pitch instead of the entire half, and matches start with a race to the ball instead of a gentle kick-off.
Rush also replaces red and yellow cards with blue cards. This new card type sends fouling players to the sin bin, where they have to cool off for 60 seconds before they’re allowed back into the game.
It's a major rule change. With only five players on a team, earning blue cards definitely hinders a side. Any time the opposition makes a run on your goal, you’ll need to weigh the cost of ending their run with an aggressive (blue card-earning) tackle against conceding a goal, creating new tactical choices for players.
Rush isn't so much a distinct mode as an entirely new variant, appearing in adjusted form within Kick Off, Career, Ultimate Team, and Clubs. In Kick-Off, you can join up with friends or populate a squad in matchmaking to play the game described above. In Career mode, you can now play youth team games in Rush mode, letting you test out the talent you’re developing to fill your main 11-a-side squad. In Ultimate Team and Clubs, you’re playing games with the cards you’ve unlocked in packs or the Virtual Player you’ve been training up.
Whatever mode you enjoy playing in EA Sports FC 25, you’ll be able to participate in many Rush matches.
FCIQ
Another new toy you’ll find bubbling up across EA Sports FC 25 is FCIQ. Powered by the same machine learning tech that led to HyperMotion, AI Mimic, and PlayStyles in previous games, FCIQ is a new tactics system that provides you more control of your teammates' behavior—and makes their behavior significantly more varied on the pitch.
Outside of a match, you can assign every player a role that fits their position, for both when your team has possession and when it doesn't. These roles dictate how players think and behave, and what positions they seek when not under your control.
If you give your Central Attacking Midfielder the Playmaker role, for example, they'll try to find a space to receive passes from the wings and keep an open path to pass onto the strikers. The same player in the Shadow Striker role will move further up the pitch, ready to race into a shooting position if you pass to them.
Play around with player positions and roles and you'll see your AI teammates take dramatically different positions from one game to the next. Each role also has a selection of focuses you can assign to further define their behavior, such as attacking or roaming.
Every player has at least one role in which they play particularly well, and some have world-class ability in certain roles, boosting how quickly they find space on the field. When creating tactics for your squad, you’ll need to account for your players’ strengths and weaknesses. Of course, if there's a particular formation and tactic you'd like to play, this new system could play a big part in what players you try to recruit in the transfer window.
You can create multiple custom tactics profiles for your team and swap between them mid-game or use a set of presets if you’d rather not spend too much time in the tactics screen. Every custom plan also has a unique identification code, so you can easily share tactics with friends or other players online.
As with Rush, FCIQ doesn’t apply to only a single game mode. It impacts player behavior in every mode with AI-controlled teammates.
Professional fouls
While Rush and FCIQ are the headline additions to EA Sports FC 25, many other smaller innovations will impact how you play—and in particular, the addition of Professional Fouls.
In previous games, you’ve been able to tackle players in a way that would almost certainly count as a foul, such as slide tackling an opposition player from behind. But EA Sports FC 25's Professional Fouls allow you to guarantee a play stoppage. It’s a tactic we’ve seen increasingly used by players in the real world, so EA thought it was about time it was added to the game.
Holding the Right Trigger and pressing 'X' on a PlayStation controller or 'A' on an Xbox controller causes your player to reach out, grab the shirt of the nearest opposing player, and pull them down. It’s a move that will almost certainly earn you a yellow card—or a red if you’ve been caught using the move multiple times—but it will stop the opposition’s run in its tracks.
Professional Fouls provoke a different calculation in Rush games, where a foul earns you the aforementioned blue card and takes you out of the action for 60 seconds. A foul in a regular game may earn you a red card, putting your team at a disadvantage for the rest of the match, but in Rush games you can always return to play. Any time the opposition makes a run on the goal, you’ll need to decide whether it's worth saving your team from conceding but leaving them to stave off the opposition until you're back on the pitch.
Live Start Points
A key draw of EA Sports FC, dating back to when the series was still called FIFA, is that each new game provides a snapshot of the current season. You could pick your team and play with their current lineup against the other accurately modeled teams in their league—at least at the start of the season.
However, as the season drew on in real life, there would be a drift in accuracy as players got transferred in and out of squads or picked up injuries, and teams would climb or fall in the ranks as games played out. By the end of a season, your Career mode could look very different from the seasons that played out in reality.
Thanks to Live Start Points in EA Sports FC 25, that’s no longer the case.
Live Start Points is a new feature in Career mode that updates the teams and stats in 11 leagues weekly to reflect the current season. You can jump into a season four weeks in and your team’s stats will accurately reflect real life. Points, goal difference, team injuries—all of a season's key markers will be the same.
With this new system, if a team faces a particularly challenging season in reality, you can start a career taking over the team and see if you can do better than the real-world manager.
It’s easy to assume a series with yearly entries will remain fairly static, but EA Sports FC 25 looks to be a big shakeup. FCIQ and Live Start Points will bring a new level of accuracy and authenticity to EA’s football simulation, while Rush and Professional Fouls will give you a new sense of control on the pitch. Expect these new features to significantly change the feel of matches, whatever mode you prefer.
EA Sports FC 25 releases on the Epic Games Store on September 27.