The one thing about EA FC that brings people back each year is that it offers many different ways for gamers to recreate the beautiful game.

The super-competitive among us are preoccupied with Ultimate Team. Those who are hungry for more collaborative glory will spend hours with their friends on Clubs. But career mode scratches a nice sweet spot between those two popular game modes.

It presents the opportunity to build your own script, either from scratch or with your favourite teams. To go from the Championship to the Champions League. To turn a dark horse into a force to be reckoned with. To create a world where all your matchday musings can come to life. 

But anyone who’s played manager career mode knows the joy that comes with building a dynasty brick by brick. To be a Pep in your pyjamas. And for the first time in any football game, players will be able to experience that joy with women’s teams in FC 25. Women’s Manager Career mode will have all the features of old, plus authentic financial models, contracts and wage structures while allowing managers to move between men’s and women’s leagues within the same career.

The upcoming edition of EA FC will allow gamers to start a manager or player career in one of five major leagues: the WSL, the NWSL, D1 Féminine, Liga F and the Frauen-Bundesliga. This much-anticipated arm of career mode comes just one year after women were added to Ultimate Team - heightening the profile of the women’s game and introducing fans to a whole new roster of ballers from the past and present.

This is an extension of all the work EA has done to develop the women’s game, including becoming a title partner of the UEFA Women in Football Leadership Programme, launching the ‘Starting XI Fund’ as an accelerator fund for women’s football and becoming DAZN’s multi-year global sponsor for its women’s Champions League broadcasts.

VERSUS flew out to EA Sports’ Bucharest office to chat with Alex Constantinescu and Andreas Wilsdorf who developed this newest iteration of career mode. We chopped it up about how women’s career mode came about, the former women’s players EA worked with to make the game mode as authentic as possible and why now is the perfect time for FC to embrace women’s football in a way no other game has.

Tell me more about the former players you spoke to about this game mode.

AW; We’re really lucky because Simone and Belle are actually part of the EA Sports team in Cologne. So we have our data and statistics team who analyse the women's game and give us the data of the teams. This is also what Simone did after she finished her playing career, she started working for Bayern Munich as a match analyst, so it was a natural fit working with her.

As game developers, the approach we took was that we are not experts on this. So let's sit together, have meetings and ask questions. Really go deeply into things like how do we execute the financial element of the game? What are the decisions you make as a female player? What are the differences in activities? How do you think as a female player? What are the challenges you face? 

One example Simone gave us is that the NWSL is still one of the most attractive to female players because of the difference in pay compared to everywhere else. But in German football, you have a couple of teams who are really professional when others really need to step up their game still. That’s part of the authenticity we wanted to represent in the game.

We all know FC Barcelona is one of the best women's teams in the game right now. The football they play is amazing and they’re dominating the Spanish league. It’s the same in Germany, you can expect basically Wolfsburg, Bayern and Frankfurt playing for the top three. I think the discrepancy is bigger there, and we wanted to show that.

But we also discussed painting a more ambitious picture of the women’s game. Do we make salaries similar to the men's game and so on. But Isabelle and Simone were really keen to show the women’s game as it is right now to remind people where it still has to go. 

But we’ve been ambitious in other ways, like with the stadiums that women’s teams play. So in the game, Frankfurt Women will always play in the Deutsche Bank Park, which is the men’s stadium. Not every match in the Frauen-Bundesliga has been played there in real life, but that should be the ambition that they always get to play in that stadium. So that's where we where we took the ambitious approach, while for others, we really kept it to the ground and talked with them deeper about it.

What was the most difficult thing for you guys to implement?

AC: So when we started doing it, the way we approached it was like, “okay, we have all of these values that we can tweak for men, but we want to have a separate set of values altogether for women players”. We wanted to be able to customise and tune the experience entirely separately to make sure we're able to depict women’s football in a different way. 

And I guess the difficult part was assuming that sometimes things are all right to stay the same. Then things got into the game, we got into practice, and we realised “wait a minute, this doesn't doesn't actually work if we put things on the same scale”.

The difference between Barcelona and all the other teams in Europe is very significant because of their youth academy and the fact that they've started developing their youth academy way longer than any of the other teams did. So they're a couple of years ahead of everybody else, and that's showing in their club worth and their transfer budget. We don't have this type of gap in the men's teams. So we had to go back and make even more tweaks for stuff that we assumed could work on the same scale. 

And then the challenge was identifying what other areas of the game we needed to change. We have a decent transfer market since we have five different leagues, but we need more. How could we make career mode exciting for somebody that plays lots of career mode with men's teams? How can we make it exciting to try a play through with women teams? 

Well, since there's not as much transfer activity, we redo the youth academy. Then it's going to be a much more interesting type of playthrough because you rely heavily on the youth academy and scouting options. So there’s a focus on improving and developing women’s teams from within as opposed to buying your way to success.

So we started off by expanding the scouting map and opened up the entire world for it. Then our new small-sided Rush game mode became an option for youth team games so we tapped into that. So lots of pieces fell into place at the right time to make women’s career mode a cohesive package for FC 25 that had youth academies alongside it. We couldn't have wished to plan it as well as it has landed a couple of years ago.

AW: I think the other challenge is the star players. There are more standout stars in women's football. A lot of teams have that one player that if they lose, are in big trouble. It will be interesting how Wolfsburg adjust after losing Ewa Pajor, for example.

And that was another challenge you can see in this game mode. There's a big difference in overall ratings, you have a lot of players in the 60s and 70s and then one or two players who are really amazing. So the moment you lose that star player in career mode, you need to work on your youth and have that next player ready. 

I think it will also be an interesting challenge at the same time having both the women’s and men’s game exist in one world. The interesting thing is you also see changes nowadays in real football, with Horst Hrubesch being manager of the German women's team, Sabrina Wittmann being the first female manager in Germany’s top three divisions with Ingolstadt. So you see these changes happening in football and having that in the game, being able to switch between the two worlds is really important.

What does the future of women’s career mode in FC look like?

AC: We want to evolve the game and keep the same pace as women's football evolves as well. We’ll have live starting points in women’s career mode. This essentially means you’ll be able to manage some of the top women’s teams from any gameweek across the 2024/25 season to give an extra real-life edge. So we are going to cover the four European leagues in that as well. The NWSL is a different story, because it doesn't follow the cadence of the European football calendar. 

But basically, whenever we think about career mode, we're thinking about men and women football. We're not putting any type of weight between them. We're treating them the same in terms of how we approach features and how we enhance the game and the experience.

AW: I think a lot of players have waited for it - that’s the feedback we’ve got. I think with the growth of the game in general and the growth of women's football, it will be really interesting to see how it will evolve in FC 25.

Pre-order FC 25 here, now.

VERSUS: When did the idea for a women’s career mode first come about?

Andreas Wilsdorf: We’ve had it in our minds for a couple of years and we just wanted to get the licences right for the top five leagues. This game mode came out of really acknowledging how the women’s game has evolved and where it’s going as well. The most recent Champions League final had something like 50,000 people in the stadium. I support Frankfurt and when our women's team played against Bayern, the attendance was 30,000 in the same season.

I'm 41, I’ve played FC since I'm a small kid and I was always able to play with my heroes. But last year, I was visiting the bank and the bank manager asked me what I did for a living. When I told him I’m a game designer for FC, he told me his daughter plays the game but she's upset she cannot play with her favourite teams. That also makes you think how much this game mode can mean. That's where it all came from.

And having former women’s players like Simone Laudehr, Nicole Baxter and Isabelle Linden in our studio really helped us because they gave the authentic insights we needed to bring this to life. It just felt like now is the time to do women's career mode and do it the right way. The one thing we didn't want to do is be half-hearted and make it a separate model. It's one world that you have together with the men's game, while still having the difference in finances and so on. I think that authenticity was really important to us.

The implementation of women’s football in EA FC has been gradual. Was that deliberate?

Alex Constantinescu: I've been with EA for a long time. FIFA 16 was the first time that we added women's teams to the game. We only had 12 or 13 international teams at the time. So we always wanted to do more.

But there were also licensing deals that needed to come through. We needed to have at least five leagues to make sure that we could have an active transfer market. And as soon as we got that certainty, we started building the women’s career mode.

AW: Of course it would have been great to have women’s football fully integrated in FIFA 16. But I also think the women's game in the last few years has grown so much. For me, 10 years ago it was super hard to get a TV station to watch a women's match for the Frauen-Bundesliga. But now I can turn on and watch it every weekend and it's amazing. 

And I think the clubs had to grow into understanding where they're going. Talking to Simone, for example, she told us there's still a long way for some of the clubs to learn how to grow the women's game. And I think we are a pivotal part of it.

We have a lot of ambassadors now like Bonmati, Marta and so on who are supporting the game, all the initiatives we have where we are pushing women's football to the forefront. Even outside of FC, like supporting the leagues in internships, in building the next leaders in women's football.

We just really want to push the women's game in general, and we feel like Ultimate Team was a good way for people to learn about it. The Women's World Cup game was a big moment too because we saw the viewership numbers of the tournament being really high. 

And I think now bringing it into career mode and making it part of one world that you as a men's manager could be like, “hey, I want to try this out, and I don't have to start a new save. I can just switch to the Women's Super League and try winning the Champions League”. That’s something I think that will be really powerful in people learning even more about the women's game and then also seeing the differences that are still there in financials and how you build your team.