EA may have deleted your Madden 23 franchise

That’s a big fumble

If you’ve worked on a Madden NFL 23 franchise in the last four months since the popular sports game was released, you may find that your efforts have vanished in a puff of smoke: EA lost around 60 percent of Madden 23 franchises saved in the cloud in the final week of 2022.

A technical issue flaring up during a ten hour window between Wednesday, December 28, 2022 and Thursday, December 29, 2022 corrupted the save files of anyone who logged into their Franchise leagues in that timeframe. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that EA’s social media announced the issue as resolved a few hours too early, baiting many players into corrupting their files by giving a false all-clear.

If you didn’t log in during this time, your Franchise mode save should be perfectly fine and you can still access it without any problems.

In a statement on their forum, the developers apologized for the incident:

"First off, we are sorry that this happened. We know how important your franchises are to you and we are actively working on a fix to restore some files via a backup as soon as possible. However, not all affected leagues can be restored. The team is currently projecting around 40% of leagues to be recovered. We will communicate an updated timeline next week around the potential restoration of save files from a backup."

Since only around 40 percent of the affected files are estimated to be recovered, over half of these franchises are gone for good. For many players this will be a devastating loss, as they will have worked on these leagues for many hours since the game was released in summer.

Madden NFL is one of the best-selling video game franchises in the US with the Franchise mode remaining one of the most popular aspects of the series. Since the holidays are a great opportunity for many players to sit down and finally immerse themselves in a game it’s possible that thousands of users are affected by the issue.

Recent stats released by EA show that Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, and Aaron Rodgers are the most successful players in Madden NFL 23, while the Kansas City Chiefs are the most popular team in the game. If you have to start over with your own league, that information might come in handy. We also have some tips for making it big in Madden 23's Franchise mode.