Allan Saint-Maximin sends the right back for a pie and dinks the ball over to Alexander Holt, who nods it down for Jude Bellingham to drill it home from the edge of the box. The ball ripples the orange and black netting. Ashnikko's Deal With It blares out from the speakers. The manager, a fetching young woman with a pink suit, dyed hair, and a wide brim fedora, races down the touchline to celebrate. This is life at TheGamer FC.
FIFA 22 has introduced create-a-club to Career Mode, and on top of the new HyperMotion technology on the pitch, it makes this the most interesting FIFA in years. Most of the rest of career mode is still unchanged. Deadline day still ticks by in ten one-hour slots with no trace of drama. Your fourth choice goalkeeper is still in your ear about having trained well and wanting to play in the FA Cup Final. Training is a waste of time, which is why everyone skips it. It's still FIFA, I get that. I understand that most people play Ultimate Team and hoping for Career Mode updates is foolish, but create-a-club represents a massive new direction for the oft-ignored part of the game, so I'll keep hoping.
Oh, there is one other new addition to Career Mode this year - stats. Oracle Cloud has joined the party, and that means a lot of number crunching. Unfortunately, amongst saddos like me who have a favourite football stats keeping organisation, Oracle Cloud is one of the least popular, because its selection of stats and incomprehensible graphics are way off the pace of other orgs. Look, even I think it's pushing it to write an article on the fake FIFA stats, so you'll have to forgive me for wedging it in here.
In create-a-club, you start Career Mode by creating a club. Funny, that. You choose the league you want to be in and the team to replace (to keep it an even 20 in the Premier League, for example), then choose their star level and age range. I went for a four-star young squad, so we had decent quality on the pitch but room to grow. You get given fake players, which is where Alexander Holt comes in. You also choose a transfer budget, which is where Saint-Maximin and Bellingham come in. You then choose a stadium and rename and recolour it - El Libertador, now called TheGamer Dome and resplendent in orange - and set the music. Ashnikko's Deal With It is the perfect goal song, and while Chelsea's walkout anthem is recognisable enough to steal, it's a bit odd that the chants of "Chelsea!" remain. Oh well.
Kit design features too. Our home kit is an oil spill orange and black affair, because that's the site's colours. Our away kit is a snazzy blue and green garb modelled after Arsenal's yellow and black JVC away kit, because I like it. You can even choose what pattern goes on the pitch, what colour the goal nets are, what the numbers on the back of the shirts look like, and build the badge. It all feels like the first effort, in a lot of ways. Loads of options are here, but most are somewhat limited. TheGamer's badge is yellow, because no orange and black combination exists. The badges can't be customised beyond picking one colour and hoping the automatic second colour lines up with what you want. Text can't be added or removed, and no sponsorships exist on your shirt. I also chose our nickname, from a list that included United, Wanderers, City, and Rovers, as The Biggest Snakes Out There. Ten games in, it's less funny than I thought it would be.
This Career Mode actually feels like mine. I've been playing FIFA for years, mostly starting off at Newcastle then branching out to a European elite club a few seasons in, or starting a second save to get the default squads and not the weird 'Lewandowski plays for Spurs now' squads that the game tangles itself up in a few years in. In those years, I just feel like I'm controlling the players and making transfers. This time, it feels like I am the club, Iggy Azalea-style. Don't need no dark rooms, don't need no Guardiola. Create-a-club is breathing new life into a mode EA mostly ignores, and it needs to be built upon going forward.