EA FC 27 Review: A Blue Title And A Familiar Pitch

This EA FC 27 review comes from someone who bleeds blue. I've supported Chelsea for as long as I can remember. I grew up in Croatia with a controller in my hand, and every September I buy the new EA Sports FC 27 game first. I played it on PS5, mostly in FC 27 Career Mode, and I've spent most evenings since launch week inside it.

My first save did what a fan's first save always does. I took Chelsea, went straight for the midfielder the real club missed on deadline day, and chased the Premier League. I won it. That season is the best thing in this game, and it's the reason the score isn't lower.

Outside Career Mode, I played a Kick-off match that no Croatian can treat as a friendly, Dinamo against Hajduk, and I started a Croatian-flavored Chelsea side in Ultimate Team. I also have serious complaints about the match engine, which drags the whole package down. Here's my verdict on every part of FC 27 I've spent time with.

EA FC 27 Review Summary

• My verdict: 7/10. FC 27 has the best Career Mode EA has shipped in years, stuck on top of a match engine that is FC 26 with a new kit.

• Manager Career carries the game. The rebuilt transfer system with Expected Transfer Value (xTV) from TransferRoom and Dynamic OVR made my Chelsea title season feel earned.

• Signing Lamine Camara from Monaco took minutes in-game, after the real deal collapsed on September 2, 2026.

• Dinamo vs Hajduk in Kick-off ended 3:1 for Dinamo, with two from Dion Drena Beljo and one from Mislav Oršić.

• FC 27 gameplay is the reason for the score. Through passes and dinked passes lean hard on manual aim, and passing frustrated me in every mode I played.

• Tactics, graphics, stadiums and cutscenes are where the game looks and feels new.

• FC 27 Ultimate Team is early days for me, with Joško Gvardiol and Martin Baturina at the center of a Chelsea squad built around a Croatian core.

Chelsea Career Mode Won Me The Title

I started my Manager Career the way I always do, with the club's real manager in the dugout. I skipped a custom manager on purpose. I wanted to see what my club looks like with one change I've wanted since deadline day, and then let the season decide whether I was right.

My change was Lamine Camara. Chelsea had terms in place with Monaco on deadline day, and the player was ready to travel to London. Then Monaco refused to sign the deal sheet and pulled out just after the 11pm cutoff on September 2, 2026. It happened on the same day Enzo Fernández left for Manchester City, which left a hole in the middle of the park that every Chelsea fan I know was talking about. So the first thing I did in FC 27 was fix it myself.

The rebuilt transfer system is the biggest improvement in the mode. Valuations now come from TransferRoom's Expected Transfer Value model, and negotiations run through stages: an enquiry, permission to talk, parallel talks with the club and the player, then completion. A Tension meter sits on screen the whole time and reacts to each offer.

The old 3D negotiation rooms are gone, replaced by a 2D interface that I found faster to read. The Camara deal went through almost embarrassingly fast. I made a sensible opening bid, Monaco came back once, I gave a little ground, and he was mine. I can't even tell you what I paid, which says something about how painless it was.

Camara slotted in next to Moisés Caicedo and the midfield finally had the balance I'd been shouting about at my TV. Dynamic OVR is the second big addition, and it changed how I picked my team. Ratings now move with form, morale and match fitness, so a player coming off three good games climbs above his base FC 27 player rating, and one who's tired or unhappy slides. I stopped picking the same eleven every weekend. I rotated for the first time in years in a Career save, and I checked the squad screen before every match the way a real manager checks the medical report.

Match fitness has also replaced training plans, except for the Energy Recovery setting, so the old ritual of micro-managing drills every week is gone. I didn't miss it. Injuries come in light, medium and severe tiers and they hit form and morale too, which made my midwinter run feel tense. EA also redesigned press conferences around choices that affect the squad, and I learned quickly to stop promising things I couldn't deliver.

AI clubs are smarter in the market as well. Rival clubs build shortlists, chase targets in parallel and do more business across the season, so I lost a backup fullback I'd been scouting to a club that simply moved first. Scouting now runs through four stages, and coaches assess potential instead of raising attributes directly. Six growth profiles decide how a young player develops, from early bloomers to late developers, and I spent far too long reading them for my academy kids. Every system I've mentioned here is broken down in the full list of FC 27 Career Mode changes.

Then came May. I won the Premier League in my first season, and I won't pretend I was calm about it. The title run had enough nervy weekends that I'd started checking results elsewhere before my own kickoff. Lifting it with Chelsea felt like the payoff for every September I've bought one of these games, and it's where the season and my save stand. I haven't started a second campaign yet, and I'm already planning the summer window.

Dinamo vs Hajduk Still Means Everything

Every Croatian knows the Eternal Derby. Dinamo Zagreb against Hajduk Split is the capital against “The Heart of Dalmatia”, the Bad Blue Boys against Torcida, and a fixture where nobody in the country is neutral. The two have spent most of the decades since arguing over who runs Croatian football. You don't play this match as a friendly, even when the menu calls it one.

Neither club comes with its league. The SuperSport HNL isn't among every league and license in FC 27, so both teams sit in the Rest of World section, and that's where I found them for a Kick-off match. I took Dinamo against a CPU Hajduk. It's the fastest way into a single match in the game, and it was a lovely little ritual to pick both sides out of that list with real squads.

Dinamo won 3:1. Dion Drena Beljo scored twice and played exactly like the striker I know from the HNL: big, direct and impossible to push off the ball in the box. Mislav Oršić got the other, and every time he picked the ball up on the left I thought about the hat-trick he put past Tottenham in the Europa League in March 2021. Hajduk's CPU pulled one back and made me nervous for a spell, which is the most authentic derby detail the game could have produced.

I liked the way the game treats clubs outside the top leagues most of all. The players move like themselves and play to their strengths, and Oršić still wants to drift inside onto his right foot. For a Croatian player, having both sides of the derby in the game matters more than it should. I'd love to see the HNL licensed in full one day, with a proper Career save at either club.

FC 27 Gameplay Is FC 26 Again

The match engine is why my score sits at 7. FC 27 gameplay is too close to FC 26, and after a few evenings I couldn't have told you which game was running if the menus were hidden. EA's gameplay notes list a long set of changes. EA pulled back AI defending so manual defending matters more, and removed auto-tackles from competitive play. There are new triggered curved runs, off-balance dribbling for players with high balance, agility and dribbling, and a reworked corner system. In my hands, most of that disappeared into the same rhythm I played all through FC 26. How many more years can a yearly football game get away with that?

Passing is where it hurts most. Through passes no longer steer toward open lanes and follow your stick input strictly, and dinked passes are now fully manual, relying on your aim and the length of the button press. That rewards precision on paper. On the pitch, my through balls under pressure went into a defender's path more often than into space, and chips over the top landed short or long in ways I couldn't read. I lost count of the times a simple ten-yard pass went to the wrong teammate in the middle third. A football game that makes the most basic action feel like a coin toss has a real problem, and it happened in every mode I played.

Curved runs are the one change I noticed every match. Triggering a run and watching a winger bend around a fullback to stay onside is satisfying when it works, and it gave Chelsea's attacks a threat in behind they didn't have in FC 26. Corners feel fresh too, with a short window to control your attackers before the delivery. The rest of it, the dribbling, the shooting and the pace of a match, felt like a roster update. The full list of FC 27 new features and gameplay changes reads bigger than the game plays.

Career Mode hides a lot of this, since a season is about more than ninety minutes. Rivals hides none of it. A competitive player who lives on the pitch will feel the sameness every single evening, and I'd expect that player to rate the game lower than I have.

Tactics And Visuals Save Some Matches

The tactics setup is the part of the match I enjoy most. FC 27 keeps the Player Roles system from the last two games, where each player gets a role and a focus that decides where he goes and what he does off the ball. I set Chelsea up with a patient build-up, pushed a fullback into midfield, and could see the team's structure change on the pitch. When the passing let me down, the tactics usually held the team together.

Tweaking roles between matches became my favorite part of a Career week. Camara as the holding piece with Caicedo covering more ground changed how my team defended after losing the ball, and I could feel it in how rarely I got caught on the counter. Opponents adjust too, and a few mid-table sides parked the bus in ways that forced me to rethink my wide players at halftime. That kind of back and forth makes a season feel like a season.

Visually, FC 27 on PS5 is stunning. Stamford Bridge under the lights looks superb, the crowd and the stands carry real atmosphere, and the grass, kits and player faces are the best I've seen in the series. I found myself leaving replays running just to watch them, which is a strange thing to enjoy more than the match itself.

Cutscenes add a lot to it. The build-up to a match, the tunnel, the celebrations and the trophy lift at the end of my season all looked like a broadcast. The moment Chelsea lifted the Premier League trophy in my save is one I'll remember. It still couldn't make me forget how many passes I misplaced on the way there.

Ultimate Team Gets A Croatian Chelsea

I've only just started FC 27 Ultimate Team, and I haven't gone deep into it yet. My first days belonged to Manager Career, so treat this section as early impressions. I've played a handful of Division Rivals matches and got a first feel for the new systems, and the stale match engine shows up here more than anywhere else.

I'm building a Chelsea side with a Croatian core. I already have Joško Gvardiol and Martin Baturina in the club. Gvardiol gives me the Premier League link at the back, and Baturina, who plays for Como, is the creative spark who links to Gvardiol through the nation. The idea is to keep adding Croatians and Chelsea players until the chemistry holds.

EA's Ultimate Team notes lay out the changes, and a few of them already show. End of Match Rewards hand out coins and SP after each game, and the Launch Update says post-match coins are several times higher than in FC 26. More rewards are tradeable, which made the market useful to me from the first evening. The new Gallery keeps a record of the players who pass through your club in themed sets, SBCs now score items instead of asking for chemistry puzzles, and PlayStyles+ are capped at three per item. The blog breaks down every one of those FC 27 Ultimate Team changes, along with how to earn Gallery Tokens.

I like the direction of the mode. Squads should stay together longer, and a slow builder like me gets more out of the coins. The problem is the football underneath it, since every Rivals match runs on the same engine I've been complaining about. I'll have a proper opinion once my Croatian Chelsea has a few weekends of Rivals behind it.

The Grounds And Extras Stay Optional

FC 27 has plenty I've barely touched. The Grounds is the new social hub, where Clubs now lives, with Kickabouts, 1v1s, 5v5 Rush and minigames across three districts. It's on PS5, Xbox Series X and S, PC and Nintendo Switch 2, and The Grounds and Clubs explained covers how it all fits together. I haven't played it properly yet, so I won't score it.

I dipped into Kickabouts and small-sided games only briefly, as a palate cleanser between Career weekends. They're quick and loose, and they're more fun with a friend than against the CPU. The rules behind Kickabouts and scoring took me a match to figure out. Player Career has a new rivalry system where you compete with teammates for a starting place. Manager Live now lets players build and share their own Creator Challenges, and I want to try one with a Chelsea scenario.

None of these changed my score. They round out a package that is already big, and anyone who plays with friends will get more out of them than I have. My evenings belong to Chelsea, and that's where my hours will keep going. I'll give The Grounds a proper look once my Career save needs a break.

Is EA FC 27 Worth Buying Right Now?

Only if Career Mode is your mode. FC 27 Career Mode is the best Manager Career I've played in this series, and the transfer rebuild and Dynamic OVR are reason enough for anyone who spends their year running a club. As a Chelsea fan, fixing the summer window in the game and winning the league with it was worth every hour. Anyone who supports a club with a messy transfer story of its own will know exactly the itch this mode scratches.

Everyone else should be more careful. If you played FC 26 every week in Rivals or Champions, the pitch will feel like the same game, and the passing changes are more likely to annoy you than win you over. At full price, that sameness is hard to defend. I'd wait for the first big gameplay updates and a sale before paying for a match engine I've already played.

A Career player loses nothing by buying early, since the mode is complete from the first save. Players who want to skip the early grind in Ultimate Team can look at the official store page lists every edition across PS5, PS4, Xbox, PC and both Switch consoles. Check your platform before you buy, since The Grounds skips PS4, Xbox One and the original Switch. If an older FIFA season is what you're after instead, our FIFA and EA SPORTS FC games collection covers the full run from the classic FIFA years through FC 27.

FAQs About EA FC 27

Final Words

FC 27 is two games sharing one disc. One is a Career Mode that finally treats running a club as a real job. Transfers have stages, ratings react to form, and my title felt like the product of choices I made across a whole season. The other is a match engine that EA sold as new and that plays like FC 26.

I'd happily recommend the first half to any Career player. The second half is what you touch in every mode, every evening, and it's why I can't go higher. A fan's title season can carry a lot, but it can't carry a pass that goes to the wrong man for the tenth time in a night.

Next, I'm watching whether EA uses the coming updates to shake up the match itself, and whether my Croatian Chelsea side can hold its own in Rivals. I'd also love the HNL fully licensed one day, so the Eternal Derby gets the full season it deserves.

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