"We Didn't Deliver", FC 27 Devs on FUT's Lost Year

"We just didn't deliver on those promises."

That's Jamey Cane, Senior Lead Game Product Manager on EA Sports FC 27's Ultimate Team, speaking to Dexerto about what went wrong with FC 26's most-played mode. It's a blunt admission from a studio that doesn't usually do blunt admissions, and it sets the tone for everything EA is trying to fix this year.

FC 26 launched strong. The gameplay felt tighter than it had in years, and early FUT content had the community engaged. But as the season wore on, frustration crept in. Content creators who'd been loyal to the mode for a decade started publicly checking out. Friday content drops felt recycled. Communication from the dev team, which had been promised as a priority at the start of the cycle, dried up. Cane acknowledged all of it directly:

"I think it's fair to say that FC 26 started out with a lot of really positive momentum. But amongst a core group of players, the ones you hear most vocal on social media, there was definitely a sentiment shift. We'd drawn a line in the sand and said we were going to communicate better with players at the start of the year. We just didn't deliver on those promises."

I've covered EA's football franchise long enough to know that public accountability from this team is almost unheard of. They'll talk about "learnings" and "evolution" all day, but flat-out saying "we didn't deliver" is different. Whether it translates into sustained action through FC 27's live season is the part that actually matters, but the starting position is encouraging.

SBCs Without the Busywork

The biggest structural change in FC 27's Ultimate Team is the overhaul to Squad Building Challenges. I covered the specifics in our earlier piece on the SBC rework, but the short pitch is this: chemistry requirements, position locks, and squad overall rating thresholds are gone for most SBC types. Instead, every player item has a score value based on its rating and rarity. You submit cards until you hit a target number.

According to EA's deep dive post, the goal is to "reduce repetitive friction around completing them" without removing meaningful decisions. In practice, this means those 500 silver cards rotting in your club since October finally have an use beyond daily SBCs. You could dump a handful of silvers or a couple of promo cards to hit the same threshold. Your call.

I'm interested to see how this plays out at the high end. The old SBC system created its own mini-economy where specific positions and leagues spiked in value based on requirements. Removing that friction is great for accessibility, but it could flatten the transfer market in ways EA hasn't fully accounted for. If every card is just a number, the only thing that matters is rating-per-coin efficiency, and that's a simpler but potentially less interesting market.

The other headline addition is the FUT Gallery, a collection-book system that tracks every player item that's ever passed through your club. Cards can be grouped into themed sets covering leagues, clubs, and nations, then graded from D up to S based on the quality of what you've submitted. Higher-rated and rarer cards push your grade up; completing sets earns cosmetics and Gallery Tokens that can be spent on Hall of FUT items featuring fan-favourite Ultimate Team legends like Hulk and Fellaini.

New holographic card variants also feed into this system. They share the same stats as their regular counterparts but carry a higher Gallery Value and a distinct black design with the player's signature. They're cosmetic flex pieces, essentially, and they don't boost your team's performance. As someone who's watched EA's monetisation closely, I appreciate that these aren't stat upgrades locked behind rarity. Whether the pack odds make them feel attainable or just whale bait will determine if the community embraces them.

Single-Player Live Events

FC 27 is also adding single-player Live Events to Ultimate Team for the first time. Previously, all live events required PvP matchmaking. Now you can progress through rounds against AI opponents, with difficulty scaling up to Ultimate for the final. The reward pool will be separate from multiplayer events.

This is a smart move that should've happened years ago. A significant chunk of FUT players prefer Squad Battles and offline content but have been locked out of live event rewards entirely. Giving them a path that doesn't require sweating through Weekend League-calibre matches is overdue, and I suspect it'll quietly become one of the most popular additions.

As VGC reported from a hands-on session at EA's Vancouver office, the original SBC format will still exist for some items, so this isn't a complete replacement. Lead producer Azlan Mustapha and Cane both framed the changes as a "two-pronged approach": fix what frustrated core players while opening new ways to engage.

EA Sports FC 27 launches September 25 on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch, and Switch 2. If the team follows through on the communication promises this time, the structural changes here could land well. If they go quiet again by November, no amount of holographic cards will fix it.