In EA FC 26, most players have long agreed that PlayStyles are the single most important metric when it comes to a player’s performance. Today, a video from FC 26 creator “BaldMun7” underscores just how true that idea really is. In a whacky experiment, the creator gave Onana the Finesse+ PlayStyle to check his goal-scoring effectiveness. In case you’re unfamiliar, Andre Onana is a goalkeeper, and he has a miserable finishing stat of 12 and a 3-star weak foot. He is a goalkeeper after all.
However, equipping him with the Finesse+ PlayStyle suddenly transforms him from a great goalkeeper into prime Messi. The creator behind this video was able to dribble past defenders and score jaw-dropping finishes both from inside and outside the box. You can check out the video and the community outrage yourself on Reddit:
PlayStyles Above All Else
This whole Onana debacle is not just an amusing oddity; it’s evidence of PlayStyle ruling as king over stats. Fans over at Reddit reacting to the clip point to the flawed logic of the Finesse+ ability itself. EA describes the PlayStyle as granting “Faster finesse shots with max curve and accuracy.” Looks like there’s a major emphasis on the accuracy part, because a player with a 12-finishing certainly should not be scoring like this.
Mechanically, this means the game is overriding a player’s base stats, such as finishing and weak foot rooting, and replacing them with near-perfect shot execution. The PlayStyle is an undeniably dominant variable in FC 26, one that can make low-rated guys perform like the highest-rated players in the game.
Here are some frustrated words from a player who confirms this issue:
“Playstyles are 100% bypassing stats, absolutely. Every single Ultimate Scream player with that temporary 99 stat boost was absolutely useless. I have Joao Felix, and between when he had 99 pace and now, I noticed absolutely zero difference. And that’s because he doesn’t have a pace playstyle.”
Adding to this problem is the developer’s dilemma. As one player summarized, there’s no way to close this “Pandora’s box without nerfing all of them into the ground and making a pivotal part of their current game worthless.” The Onana saga, initially dismissed as an edited clip, was definitively proven real by the creator’s live streams. BaldMun7 even did a separate run where a bronze center-back with Finesse+ was similarly dominant. Not a good look for what’s supposed to be the best football sim out there.
