Women’s soccer will have a fully featured single-player career mode in EA Sports FC 25 for the first time, allowing players to create a superstar and take her on a journey through five professional leagues at parity with the longstanding Career for male players.

“The key thing that we wanted to do was present the women’s career authentically, and make it feel like it really was, not just like ‘men’s career with women players,’” Pete O’Donnell, game design director on EA FC 25, said during a preview event July 11. “A lot of the systems behind the two mostly work the same; but it’s the financial models and other things that make a really big difference.”

EA Sports FC players can start a manager or player career in one of five leagues: England’s Women’s Super League; the United States’ National Women’s Soccer League; France’s Division 1 Féminine; Spain’s Liga F and Germany’s Frauen-Bundesliga. Big licenses are a calling card of EA Sports’ flagship sports product, O’Donnell said, and the development team wanted to give the women’s career the same treatment, as it also demonstrates a commitment to full parity.

EA Sports FC 25 will be the second team sports video game to establish a full women’s career mode. 2K Sports’ NBA 2K21 was the first with “The W” for the WNBA, and though it has evolved it is still a wholly separate mode that does not cross over with the game’s larger MyCareer mode based on the NBA, including its open world of rec league and street park games. What O’Donnell described last week is integrated within EA Sports FC 25’s Career suite, including the ability to retire as a women’s pro and cross over to a men’s league as a coach.

The women’s game itself in Career will emphasize youth soccer, where it plays a bigger role in developing talent for the parent club. That means the youth academy component of a manager’s career will, for the first time in EA FC, include playable events — for both women’s and men’s career. Players who start Career in a women’s league will also find tighter “financial models,” which, O’Donnell mentioned, won’t mean simply fewer dollars, pounds, or euros.

“The key kind of differences, within women’s football, is the finances,” O’Donnell said. “They’re managing tighter budgets, they’re negotiating a lot shorter contracts, and women’s football is a lot more people moving at the end of contracts when they’re out of contract, adapting to different salary structures, and the realities of smaller transfer portals.”

Contract negotiations for top stars are also a lot more competitive because of this, O’Donnell said. Rather than consider these differences hindrances, or a throttling of the men’s management system, O’Donnell said they help the women’s half of Career feel distinct, and present a wholly different challenge. Such nuances and emphases made their way into the mode after close consultation with experts in women’s professional soccer, O’Donnell said, two of whom are employed by EA Sports.

“I don’t want to sit here and say, ‘I know everything about women’s football,’” O’Donnell said. “We’ve got a woman on our team, Simone Laudehr, who scored the winning goal in the 2007 World Cup for Germany; we’re lucky enough to have Nicole [Baxter] an ex-NWSL player. We’ve been trying to surround ourselves with people who know more about [women’s] football.”

Youth academy play answers a longstanding request

Producer Andreas Wilsdorf said that the importance of youth soccer to the women’s professional game made EA FC 25 a great time to deliver on a longtime request from the game’s community, and that’s a playable youth academy — again, for both women’s and men’s career.

In the past, academy operations and promotions out of it have been handled strictly in-menu. Now, when EA FC 25’s gaffers visit the academy, they will be able to play with top prospects in EA FC 25’s new 4v4 Rush game, to get a feel for their pace, ball-handling, movement, finishing and the like.

“Just being able to play with your youth players just makes such a huge difference,” O’Donnell said. “It really brings it to life […] rather than it being on a spreadsheet, we’re actually bringing it to life.”

Rush, as described in our general preview, actually has five players, as one is an AI keeper. But it’s a fast-paced game whose limited roster means each player spends more time on the ball, which in Career’s case gives a manager more of a feel for what that prospect will play like, regardless of position.

Moreover, players can choose from two ways to play their budding stars in Career Rush — at their current overall rating, which will usually be somewhere in the 60s, or at their maximum potential rating, should everything go their way and they become a pro.

“The whole idea behind this was, imagine if you could have played [Lionel] Messi when he was 15 years old,” Wilsdorf explained. “Doing this, we think, you’ll get really attached to your youth players.”

These youth tournaments will take place every two months (in game time) Wilsdorf said and, yes, the players really will look like teenagers playing soccer — no more supposed 16-year-olds running around with full beards. They’ll change in physique, too, as they mature, he promised.

Scouting improvements will polish off your best virtual club

Scouting is the other off-the-field realm in which EA Sports FC 25 players will see deeper connections and bigger results. Wilsdorf said the game is adding another 90 countries to scout, bringing the total to 160 worldwide, with the overall goal of helping players find the next gold nugget, should their top star have eyes on another team or league.

Additionally, managers can direct their scouts to look at four specific positions, instead of just scouting a territory on the whole. Wilsdorf used strikers and attacking midfielders as an example, compensating for the expected loss of a top goal-scorer like Kevin de Bruyne at Manchester City.

As to that, Career will reflect real-world developments in that EA FC will offer players a chance to start a career not just from the beginning of a season, but in the middle of it, after major developments have gone through.

O’Donnell said these starting points will be updated on a live-service basis throughout the year, on a week-to-week basis, reflecting the roster, table, and other real-life developments among EA FC 25’s 11 different licensed leagues at that point. Really impactful changes, like a manager or player switching clubs, will become their own “snapshot” starting point, as well.

EA Sports FC 25 launches Sept. 27 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.