The Genre Nobody Is Willing to Save
Football gaming is in a creative coma right now. Not a temporary dip, not a rough patch — a full, medically-induced, nobody-is-rushing-to-wake-it-up coma. The biggest releases of any given year either double down on Ultimate Team monetisation or quietly disappear from conversation within six months. Career mode, the mode that millions of players spend the majority of their time in, has received no meaningful structural innovation in years. And the industry's collective response to this stagnation has been to add slightly shinier menus and call it progress.
The root cause is not hard to diagnose. When Pro Evolution Soccer was competing seriously with FIFA, both games got better. When PES declined and effectively exited the market, EA had no reason to push career mode forward, no reason to take creative risks, and no reason to do anything other than optimise the systems that generate the most revenue. That is not a conspiracy — it is just basic market economics. Competition makes products better. The absence of competition makes them lazy.
What follows is not a wishlist of minor tweaks. These are ten ideas — some reboots, some entirely new concepts — that could genuinely change what football gaming looks like. Some are ambitious. Some are controversial. All of them are more interesting than anything the major publishers have announced recently.
1. Bring Back Pro Evolution Soccer — Properly
Let's start with the most obvious one because the case for it is almost too easy to make. Pro Evolution Soccer, in its peak years, was a genuinely great football game. Master League offered a deep, rewarding management career that let you build a club across multiple seasons. Become a Legend gave players a personal story mode built around crafting a single footballer's journey. Neither mode reached its full ceiling, but both were solid, enjoyable alternatives that kept EA honest.
eFootball is not PES. It never was and it never will be. The brand was hollowed out, the business model was rebuilt around free-to-play mechanics, and whatever identity made the original series special was quietly buried in the process. Football Life on PC is doing admirable work keeping something of that spirit alive through the modding community, but it is built on an ageing foundation with real limitations on how far community effort alone can take it.
What the genre actually needs is a fully funded, properly developed PES successor that forces EA back into a competitive mindset. Not a spiritual successor. Not a free-to-play experiment. A proper rival. The moment that rival exists, career mode stops being an afterthought and starts receiving real development resources — because EA would have to justify why players should choose their game over the alternative.
2. FIFA Street Deserves a Real Comeback
Before the inevitable defence of Volta arrives: no. Volta was not FIFA Street. Volta was a minigame accidentally promoted to the main menu. It had novelty for approximately four hours, after which most players had seen everything it had to offer and quietly returned to the modes that actually held their attention.
FIFA Street was something genuinely different. It was a standalone game with a proper story mode, a world tour that sent you across the globe building and managing your own crew, and enough depth to justify the time you put into it. It had personality. It felt like something worth investing real hours in rather than a feature designed to pad out a marketing bullet point list.
A modern FIFA Street done properly — with a hundred cities across the world, each with their own visual identity and court culture, real-life street football tournament structures like the Kings League woven into the progression, and genuine narrative stakes attached to building your crew — would have a massive, waiting audience. People still talk about the original games fondly. The appetite was never killed. It was just never properly satisfied after the series ended.
3. A Football-Themed Open World Built Around Fan Culture
This one requires an open mind, so set any initial scepticism aside for a moment. What if someone made a football-themed open world game built around supporter culture and the world that exists in the stands rather than on the pitch?
GTA is one of the best-selling game franchises in history and it involves carjacking, armed robbery, and large-scale criminal enterprises. Bully was critically praised and it centred a school kid who beats people up. The games industry has a long, commercially successful history of exploring fictional versions of morally complex worlds when the execution is creative and the craft is present. A football-themed version of that is not some outrageous conceptual leap.
The concept practically writes itself. You start as a nobody fan and work your way up through the ranks of a firm, earning reputation, building connections, and navigating the politics of rival groups, corrupt officials, and a football establishment that barely acknowledges your existence. Set it in England with European away days woven into the mission structure and you have a game that explores a side of football culture that no developer has ever seriously attempted to capture — the songs, the rituals, the loyalty, the absolute chaos of a derby day. The audience for something this singular would be substantial.
4. A 2K Football Game — or a Fully Customisable Alternative
NBA 2K is far from a perfect product and its critics are largely right about its faults. But the MyCareer experience in 2K's basketball titles has more narrative depth, more personality, and more genuine story investment than anything EA has put into a football career mode in the better part of a decade. The gap is embarrassing when you look at both side by side.
A 2K entry into football — with that same energy applied to manager mode and player career — would be transformative. Not because 2K would automatically produce something perfect, but because competition changes the calculus for everyone. EA responding to a serious rival is a better outcome for players than EA operating in a vacuum and responding to nothing.
For those who recognise that a full licensing war over club names and player likenesses is a genuine barrier, there is a compelling alternative version of this idea worth considering: a fully customisable football game with no licensing requirements, where the community can import their own leagues, clubs, players, and kits entirely from scratch. No legal battles. Total creative freedom. Pure football. That alone would justify the purchase price for a significant portion of the market.
5. Bring Back Dedicated World Cup Games
There was a time when World Cup years came with dedicated games to match — proper standalone titles with full qualification campaigns, national team management, and the complete journey from regional qualifiers all the way to lifting the trophy. The 2010 South Africa game represents the obvious peak of that era and it remains fondly remembered for exactly that reason.
That experience has completely vanished from football gaming. International football barely registers in modern career modes, and when the actual World Cup arrives every four years, there is nothing of genuine substance to play that captures what the tournament means. For a sport where the World Cup is unambiguously the biggest event on the planet, that is a baffling gap in the market.
A dedicated World Cup game covering full qualifying campaigns with any nation in the world would sell itself on nostalgia and demand alone. Whether it should be a standalone release or a deeply developed mode inside an existing title is a legitimate debate worth having. But the absence of either option, given how many people care deeply about international football, is one of the stranger oversights in the genre's current landscape.
6. Football Origins — A Game Set in the Sport's Past
This is a completely new concept and arguably the most creatively interesting idea on this list. What if a developer made a football game set decades in the past — the 1950s, 1960s, perhaps even earlier — where the sport itself was fundamentally different from anything players recognise today?
Football in that era was genuinely alien compared to the modern game. Pitches were muddy and unpredictable. Players were slower and far less technically refined by contemporary standards. Tactical understanding was primitive. Transfers happened through handshakes and conversations in pub car parks rather than multi-million-pound negotiations involving agents, lawyers, and intermediaries. Wages were almost unrecognisably small. The entire ecosystem of the sport was different in ways that would make for fascinating gameplay constraints.
A career mode set in that world — as a manager or a player — would be unlike anything currently available. You would scout talent differently because there was no data, no video footage, no analytics infrastructure. Just word of mouth and watching someone play on a cold Tuesday evening. The politics of the game, the relationship between clubs and players, the absence of modern media scrutiny — all of it would create a genuinely fresh experience. The licensing challenges around historical players and clubs are real, but a fully fictional world built with period accuracy would be just as compelling. Football's history is rich enough that you do not need real names to make it feel authentic.
7. Football 2100 — A Dystopian Future Setting
On the complete opposite end of the timeline: a football game set a century from now. Not a utopian version of the future. A dark one.
The premise is called Football 2100. It is the start of the next century and football is no longer just a sport — it is state-controlled propaganda. Governments and mega-corporations own city clubs. Matches are broadcast as unity events designed to keep populations distracted and compliant. Results are not always determined by what happens on the pitch, and you exist inside this system as a player or manager whose choices determine how complicit you become in the corruption surrounding you.
The visual possibilities alone are extraordinary. Futuristic stadiums with technology built into every surface. Debates about whether AI players should be permitted to compete. Corporations fighting over broadcast rights in ways that make modern TV deals look modest by comparison. The narrative depth available here would be unlike anything football gaming has ever attempted — and crucially, it would be the first football game with something genuine to say about the world it reflects. Do you play along with a system that may partially fix results in exchange for trophies? Do you resist at the risk of your career? Every decision would carry real weight.
8. Bring FIFA Manager Back From the Dead
This one is for the Football Manager crowd, and there are a lot of them. FIFA Manager was EA's deep management simulation — no playing matches, just the full tactical and administrative experience of running a football club. At its peak, it was genuinely considered competitive with Football Manager in terms of depth, and it had a dedicated fan base that cared about it seriously.
EA discontinued it over a decade ago, which in retrospect looks like one of the stranger business decisions in sports gaming history. They had a well-regarded product addressing a completely different segment of the market from their main title, with a loyal audience and real competitive standing, and they simply walked away from it. The modding community is still keeping old FIFA Manager versions alive today, which tells you everything about the unmet demand that exists.
Football Manager currently has essentially zero serious competition in the management simulation space. A modern FIFA Manager built on a decade's worth of additional development would be a genuine rival, and the FM community would respond strongly to having a properly resourced alternative for the first time in years. The market is there. It has been there the entire time.
9. Sunday League — The Comedy Football Game Nobody Has Made
After everything serious on this list, here is one that leans fully into chaos and comedy. A Sunday league football game. No professional players, no Champions League nights, no World Cup glory — just raw, unpolished, slightly chaotic park football played by people who probably had a curry the night before.
The concept is genuinely rich. You build your own Sunday league team from scratch in your local area. Your players have questionable fitness levels and tactics that extend roughly as far as hoofing it long and hoping the big lad up front gets a touch. The dark arts of lower league football are fully present — shirt pulling, tactical time wasting, arguing with a referee who is probably someone's uncle and volunteered because nobody else would. You build rivalries with local clubs, try to climb through regional divisions, and at some point a retired professional moves to the area and inexplicably ends up playing for you on Saturday mornings.
Most people who love football experience it this way — in parks, on muddy pitches, on cold Sunday mornings with seventeen people watching from the sideline. No game has ever captured that world, and there is an entire culture worth exploring in it.
10. Baller's Life — The Open World Football Experience
The final concept is the most ambitious and probably the most exciting. An open world game structured similarly to GTA where you play as a footballer rising through the ranks — but the actual football matches are not what you play. You live the life around them instead.
The core premise is that your lifestyle, preparation, and decisions away from the pitch determine how your player performs when match day arrives. Go out the night before a big game, skip recovery sessions, neglect your diet, and your performance suffers measurably. Train properly, manage your relationships carefully, make smart decisions about your career, and you peak at the right moments.
But the game goes beyond athletic performance. You are also building a profile as a public figure. You walk around your training ground, visit the city, manage sponsorship relationships, navigate media appearances and public controversies. Being famous has real consequences — some beneficial, some genuinely disruptive to your ability to perform as a footballer. The tension between being a celebrity and being an elite athlete is something real footballers deal with constantly, and no game has ever explored it properly. A sandbox world built around that tension, where every night out is a calculated risk and every social media post carries potential consequences, would be unlike anything the football gaming market has ever produced.
The Genre Can Be Saved — But Not By Doing the Same Thing
None of these ideas are impossible. Several of them — the World Cup game, FIFA Manager's return, a proper FIFA Street successor — are not even particularly risky from a commercial standpoint. The demand is documented and the audience is waiting. The others are more ambitious, but ambition is exactly what the genre is currently missing.
Football gaming does not need a better loading screen animation or a slightly redesigned chemistry system. It needs genuine creative investment, real competition between developers, and at least one person at a major studio willing to ask what football gaming could be rather than what it has always been. Until that happens, we are all stuck waiting for a genre that has the audience, the passion, and the source material to be extraordinary — and keeps choosing to be ordinary instead.
