EA Sports has revealed its plan to simply “make gameplay better” in FC 26 via a Gameplay Deep Dive posted to its official YouTube channel.
It’s become cliche to describe the year-to-year changes in FC (and previously FIFA) games as iterative or incremental, but there’s not much more you can say to describe the nerdy, under-the-hood tinkering that goes on underneath the match engine to create a meaningfully different experience between releases.
This three word mantra is the next step in EA’s seemingly back-to-basics and down-to-earth approach with FC 26, which it says is its “most community driven title” to date.
For many players, the most interesting changes come as part of what EA is calling “Gameplay Fundamentals”.
This is supposed to include:
- More responsive dribbling
- Clearer movement with fewer sprinting types
- More consistent goalkeepers who push the ball out of play and to teammates
- Tackles which keep the ball or ricochet to teammates instead of the opponent
- No more timed finishing, but every player can low-driven by double-tapping shoot
Some of these changes are quite nebulous, like “more responsive” dribbling has supposedly been achieved by rebalancing and retuning animations, foot preference logic and the time between dribbling touches.
However, some are more obvious. The in-between sprint styles like “Controlled Lengthy” have been removed and there are now just three again: Explosive, Controlled and Lengthy. So while there will probably still be outliers, hopefully there will be fewer instances of random players being unexpectedly rapid.
Defensively, two huge community bugbears for years have been rebound goals from klutzy keepers and the ball seeming to be sucked back towards the feet of an attacker you’ve already tackled three times.
For goalies, EA has apparently given them a more control of deflections to significantly increase the chance of them going out of play or to a teammate, while work has also been done to help them track the flight of the ball and cut down on green-timed finesse and trivela exploits.
Similar changes have been made to the trajectory of loose balls after a tackle, in a direct effort to combat the situation every FC player has encountered, where you feel like every time you wrestle the ball from your opponent it immediately nestles back at their feet.
Speaking of green-timed trivela shots flying in from the corner flag, timed finishing has been completely removed and the recently introduced low-driven shot has been remapped to a double-tap of the shoot button after powering up your shot.
Timed finishing was an interesting mechanic for increasing the skill-gap needed for high-level play, but it obviously proved difficult to balance for EA. If you could master it, as seen in the later stages of FC 25, you could ping in trivelas from almost anywhere in the attacking third in a way that wasn’t conducive to reactive, back-and-forth gameplay.
To finish on another cliche: as always, how these changes play out in the final mix remains to be seen. But you can pour over the rest of the gameplay changes in EA Sports FC 26 in the gameplay deep dive video on EA Sports’ YouTube channel, including the 5 new PlayStyles coming in FC 26.
EA Sports FC 26 releases, fittingly, on September 26 2025 on PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo consoles, and PC.