Few things sports gamers worry about more in the days and weeks leading up to a new edition than the new ratings, and they’re not alone, as players care a great deal, too. Whether somebody’s rating goes up or down is big news, and how accurately or not a player is represented in the game is fodder for discussion, as fans love finding players who are too good or too poor compared to real life.
The developers of these games know how important these ratings are and put a lot of effort into getting them as accurate as possible, but with so many players to rate, particularly in a game like EA FC 26, which covers so many teams in leagues around the world, sometimes there are misses. On some occasions, this is simply misreading a player and their capabilities, but on other occasions, it’s something deeper. Sometimes, a player and their talents simply do not translate accurately to the game engine. When this happens, you get players who prove to be a constant struggle for developers to accurately recreate in-game.
How Are Players Rated In EA FC Games?
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Like any major sports release, the ratings provided by players are handled through scouting of those individual players. Much as professional sports teams use scouts to watch players and assess their abilities based on watching them, developers like EA hire their own scouting professionals whose job is to assess the players who will be appearing in the game.
This can be done in a variety of ways, from direct observation at games to reading professional scouting reports to watching broadcasts of games. When doing so, scouts pay attention to how players perform with the specific attributes used in the game as their benchmark to assess how well or poorly an athlete performs in the various categories to attempt to best recreate their real-world selves in virtual form.
How Can EA FC Ratings Fail To Represent A Player?
There are two major ways that a misrating can lead to a player who does not feel as good on the EA FC pitches as they do on the real-world ones. The first is simply a matter of underestimating a player’s ability. When the scouts in the game don’t see a player as being capable of what they ultimately prove capable of when the games start, you end up with someone whose attributes are below players who, in the real world, are not performing as well at those given attributes.
Although scouts do their best to minimize the instances of errors like this, when assessing so many players, there will always be misses, especially since there are always surprise players. When an athlete has a breakout year that surpasses their previous performance, it can be nearly impossible for scouts to accurately predict it, as it often comes out of the blue.
Another way players can end up being worse in-game than in real life is when the way their particular abilities combine in the real world simply don’t translate as effectively within the game engine. While modern sports gaming engines can be spectacularly realistic at times, they are still a game engine and cannot match the truly incalculable variables at play in a real-world sport.
For players whose abilities are more unique, even giving them boosts above what direct observation would imply doesn’t always succeed in making them as valuable to your EA FC team as they are to some of the biggest clubs in the world.
What Types Of Players Tend To Be Undervalued In EA FC?
The players who tend to be most chronically underrated throughout the FIFA/EA FC series are those who do not fit the traditional mold of their role or who are highly cerebral. While the game does include attributes for mental considerations, sometimes a player’s real-world ability to read games and identify opportunities, or to always know where they need to be defensively, just cannot be fully realized in a video game. This results in players who either rate too lowly, or who, even when carrying a higher rating, still fail to feel as dominant as their real-world selves.
The Players EA FC Has Struggled With The Most
Through the years, some players have proven to be a real conundrum to the number-crunchers at EA for their unique talents. Here are some of the most chronically underrated EA FC players:
- Thomas Müller: A man so famous for being underrated in video games that multiple feature stories have been written about EA’s efforts to find a way to make him as excellent as he is. Broadly accepted as one of the greatest footballers of the modern era, Müller has been a central cog in the most dominant club and national sides of the 2000s, but always feels just a bit underpowered in-game.
- Sergio Busquets: In a bit of a trend, the next name on the list is another player famous for their football brain. Busquets was the heart of a Barcelona midfield that is among the most dominant of all time; however, as a player not generally viewed as a physical dynamo, this can lead to him feeling less vital in-game. While the intangibles he provides are less represented, plugging in a different DM with more physical tools could make your Barca squad even scarier.
- Jordan Henderson: Once again, we find ourselves in the midfield looking at a player who is more famous for his mental abilities than his physical ones. Henderson was an ever-present part of Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool sides, captaining the club to its famous drought-ending Premier League title in the 2019/2020 season. Despite being a must-start player for one of the more dominant sides of the Premier League era, Henderson was not quite as indispensable in FIFA more often than not.
- Robert Lewandowski: There are few goal scorers in history more talented, prolific, or decorated than Lewandowski. After leading Borussia Dortmund to a surprising Bundesliga title, Lewandowski moved on to a career leading the line for two of the biggest clubs ever in Barcelona and Bayern Munich. In the EA FC games, Pace is king, and too often players have found that Lewandowski is simply less suited to lead the line than less-talented players with better wheels.
- Olivier Giroud: Closing things out is a player who spent much of his real career underrated as well, before eventually becoming one of the most-widely cited examples of an underrated player instead. Giroud’s game as a creation-first striker was a bit ahead of its time, helping with his late-career rise, and the EA FC engine never seemed to make a striker with nimble feet and passing at the top of the box as useful as Giroud proved to be in nailing down the role for a World Cup-winning France in addition to big clubs in multiple top-five leagues.
Rating players is an inexact science, and a game engine can only replicate the real world so well. These players were victims of those imperfections, but did you have an underrated fave we missed out on, too?
