The verdicts started landing on 17 September, a week ahead of the game going on sale — Steam’s page says 24 September, EA’s own materials say the 25th, and the two have not been reconciled anywhere I can find. Six of those verdicts carry a number I could convert and check. The mean is 7.5. The range runs from 6 to 8.5.
That is a two-and-a-half point spread on a football game, which is not how this series usually reviews. FC scores cluster. Everybody knows what the thing is, everybody has played fifteen of them, and the annual verdict tends to be a half-point wobble around eight. A spread this wide means the reviewers are scoring different things. What divides them is whether The Grounds counts.
| Outlet | Score |
|---|---|
| Athlon Sports | 8.5 |
| Metro GameCentral | 8 |
| GAMINGbible | 8 |
| Indigo Geek | 7.5 |
| Insider Gaming | 7 |
| Eurogamer.de | 6 |
The aggregators have not settled either. OpenCritic sits at 81 with 67 percent of critics recommending; a German round-up on 19 September had Metacritic at an early 74 off a handful of reviews. Seven points between two aggregators on the same week is a sample-size artefact, and both will move.
One verdict I left out of the arithmetic. Radio Times ran a review headlined “a new low”, reported in a German round-up at one star — but I could not open the outlet’s own page to confirm the star count, and a 2.0 dropped into a six-item set moves the average by most of a point. It exists, it is the angriest thing written about this game, and its complaint is the £139.99 Ultimate Plus pre-order edition rather than anything on the pitch.
Where the year went
The Grounds is an open, persistent social space you walk around in. Minigames, small-sided matches, other players milling about. For a football game that is a second genre bolted to the side of the first, and the engineering distance between the two is larger than the marketing makes it sound.
A stadium is the easiest large environment in games. It is a closed box. The camera lives on a rail somewhere above the halfway line, so you know the frustum before you build anything; the lighting is baked or driven by a handful of authored presets; the crowd is instanced cards with a few thousand variations and nobody ever gets close enough to care; the playable surface is one material on one plane, 105 by 68 metres, and the player never leaves it. Twenty-two characters, one ball, a known camera. You can spend the entire budget on the things the broadcast camera actually sees.
An open hub throws all of that out. Now you are streaming, because the player can walk somewhere. You need traversal animation for a body rig built to sprint, turn and strike a ball, not to amble past a kebab van. Time of day has to move or the space feels like a photograph. And the netcode has to hold an indeterminate number of players in one shared area rather than twenty-two in a deterministic match sim, which is a different problem wearing the same hat.
Do that inside a twelve-month annual cycle and something else gets less. Which is, more or less, what the reviews say: the football is better in specific, noticeable ways, and it is better by increments.
The increments are animation work
The one change nearly every reviewer names is that the ball stops behaving like it is magnetised. Eurogamer’s German edition put it plainly — the ball sticks less to the feet, and a player’s actual attributes matter more. Defending relies less on AI assistance. Attacking runs and corners want more input.
Loosening ball-to-foot attachment reads on a feature list as a tuning value. Most of its cost lands on the animation set. The old behaviour — ball snapped to a socket, contact resolved by fiat — is doing enormous work hiding failure. Once you let the ball live in physics between touches, the player can reach for it and miss, arrive a frame late, get a shin instead of a laces. Every one of those is a state the animation set now has to cover, or it reads as foot sliding and clipping, which is the thing players screenshot. The reaching, stretching, off-balance contacts are the expensive part.
That is real craft, and it is invisible in a trailer. It is also exactly the kind of work that does not move a score, because a reviewer who gets it right just says the game “feels better”.
The complaint that never changes
Microtransactions in The Grounds, pay-to-win in Ultimate Team, live-service progression sitting across the modes people actually play. Every review in the set above raises it somewhere, and the ones at the bottom of the range raise it first.
We have been here twice in three weeks. EA’s other annual sport landed on a 7 when reviewers went after NHL 27’s generative-AI commentary, a complaint about a shipped feature nobody asked for. And 2K, running the same annual treadmill, got an 8.5 because NBA 2K27 put its year into simulation fidelity rather than a new place to stand around in. Three annualised sports sims, three very different answers to the same question: what do you build when you cannot rebuild the sport?
FC 27’s answer was a town square. The scores suggest a third of the people reviewing it would have preferred another year on the grass.
Scores and prices here are as of 22 September 2026, and the sample is small enough that the 7.5 will move once the rest of the reviews file.