The Career Mode in FIFA games has been growing staler and staler with each new yearly instalment, and fans of the series have been clamouring for much-needed major improvements for some time now. FIFA 22 is already making some pretty significant improvements to the on-pitch gameplay, but it seems it will finally be introducing some interesting features in the Career Mode as well.
EA Sports has previously very briefly mentioned custom clubs for FIFA 22’s Career Mode, and they’ve now officially confirmed that players will be able to create their own club in this year’s game, and provided extensive details on it. Creating your own club will, of course, entail choosing your team’s name (and selecting the nickname that the commentary team will refer to it as), creating your team’s crest and kits, and customizing your own stadium.
Crest creation will include a variety of shapes, patterns, and logos, while stadium creation will let you choose your stadium’s base colours, seat colours, net pattern, pitch pattern, and more. You can also customize your stadium’s atmosphere to your liking by selecting from a range of goal songs, crowd chants, and walkout anthems. At the beginning of each season, you’ll be able to customize your crest, kits, and stadium to your liking.
You can choose to start in any tier in any nation, and whichever team you replace will be moved to the Rest of the World pool of clubs. And how will you build your squad? You’ll be given a starting group of players that will be randomly generated, and their nationality will be decided by the percentage of players of that nationality in whatever league you’re playing in.
Following that, you can set your own starting budget (up to 1 billion of whatever currency you’re using), and purchase players according to your liking. Meanwhile, you can also set your club’s board priorities, though certain priorities (such as domestic and continental success) will vary based on your club’s star rating.
Other improvements include new and better cutscenes during transfer negotiations, being able to start or stop scouting a player from the Transfer Hub, and expanded stories, which will better celebrate achievements and career milestones for players and managers, for things such as reaching a certain number of matches played, winning personal awards, winning trophies, and more. On PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and Stadia, these milestones will be celebrated not only with news stories shown on your Career Mode hub, but also with pre-match cutscenes and remarks from the commentary team during matches.
Other new cutscenes have also been added to heighten atmosphere, including new team warm up sequences, locker room moments, teams inspecting the pitch, the groundskeeper making last minute changes, or even the crowd beginning to leave early if your team is underperforming in an important match. Meanwhile, cutscenes for transfer announcements will now take place in stadiums instead of the press room.
There’s certainly plenty of interesting additions and improvements being made to the Career Mode, which is great to see for fans who’ve been asking for the same for a number of years running. Seeing how much time so many players invest in the mode each year, it’s about time it saw some significant improvements.
FIFA 22 launches on October 1 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Stadia, PS4, Xbox One, and PC. It will also release as another Legacy Edition for the Nintendo Switch.
