Video Games

EA Sports FC 24 to feature Women’s Ultimate Team, leakers claim

A shiny new mode for the first year without FIFA?

Marco Wutz

EA Sports FC 24 to feature Women’s Ultimate Team, leakers claim
EA Sports FC 24 to feature Women’s Ultimate Team, leakers claim /

Leakers claim that EA Sports FC 24, the next iteration of EA Sports’ soccer simulation series, will feature an Ultimate Team mode with female athletes. These leaks come in the wake of EA adding the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) and UEFA Women’s Champions League (UWCL) to FIFA 23, which is the latest release of the popular franchise and will be the last to bear the FIFA name.

EA Sports and FIFA, the global governing body of soccer, have proclaimed an end to their hugely successful partnership with each other in 2022 after two decades. EA reportedly was unhappy with creative restrictions imposed by FIFA, which also wanted to more than double the license costs for continuing the cooperation. Therefore, future soccer video games developed by EA will be titled EA Sports FC starting with EA Sports FC 24, which is expected to launch in Fall 2023.

EA made a lot of progress with the integration of female players in FIFA 23, putting Chelsea FC star Samantha Kerr on the game’s cover and adding lots of animations specifically tailored to authentically represent how the beautiful game is played by women. The update with the NWSL and UWCL, which will go live on March 15, 2023, is merely the latest step in this development – and if the leakers are right, it won’t be the end of it.

Women’s Ultimate Team would not be the first instance of EA Sports adding female players to one of its cash cow game modes: NHL 23 already includes the possibility of adding women to national teams in Hockey Ultimate Team.

The FIFA community is less than thrilled about this possibility, not exactly presenting a very open-minded image of itself – from making tasteless misogynistic jokes to threatening not to play a game featuring such a mode, many players seem to be prejudiced regarding such a change, which seems relatively typical for an audience of a male-dominated sports game.

However, a few voices have a more positive outlook and hope that such a game mode could further enhance the popularity and inclusivity of the series.

An expansion of the female presence in EA Sports FC 24 seems on the horizon outside of a potential Women’s Ultimate Team mode as well:

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It seems like EA is slowly adding more and more female clubs to its game database in order to include them in the next title – from the look of things, the premium female soccer league in Germany, the Frauen-Bundesliga, might be one of the competitions that will be added.

For the moment, this all remains unconfirmed, but we expect to learn more about EA Sports FC 24 during Summer 2023.

Published
Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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