FC 26 Career Mode Guide

Welcome to our complete FC 26 Career Mode guide. It has evolved again in FC 26, offering deeper systems, smarter AI, and more ways to manage your club or player. You’ll learn how to pick the best teams, hire the right managers, and discover rising young stars worth signing. We’ll also explain new features like Manager Live, Manager Market, and Unexpected Events that reshape your career journey.

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Read our other FC 26 guides:

• FUT Champions Guide
• How to Make Coins
• Trophy Guide
• Skill Moves Guide
• Chemistry Styles Guide
• Clubs Guide

How Does Career Work in FC 26?

This year’s career mode provides two distinct ways to play:

• Manager Career
• Player Career

Manager career provides the most expansive experience and is the main way to play the career mode. Here, you will pick a team, manage it, play for it, scout for young talents, raise them in the academy, trade your players to other clubs, and so much more. 

FC 26 brings some new ways to play this mode, introducing Manager Live, which brings a live-service element not only to multiplayer mode, but to a single-player one as well.

In it, you will get challenges that change the way you play the game and reward you with some nice stuff like ICONs, Heroes, and unique club retrokits. Completing a challenge also makes you progress on a season pass ladder, which gives you rewards for any mode in the game. But maxing out a season pass might take a lot of time and effort, so if you want to reap all the benefits without spending so much time in-game, we can help you out with our Season Pass Boost.

Apart from that, FC 26 also adds a new fun gameplay mechanic called Unexpected Events, which tries to emulate the hectic nature of a full season, providing both obstacles and exhilarating highs on your path.

Player career has also seen some drastic changes compared to FC 25, where you now choose an Archetype for your player, based on some ICONs from football’s history. This game mode is closer to the RPG games, where you gradually upgrade your player character. If you want to read more about the best Archetypes and Builds for your player, we have a guide just for you. In this guide, we will mainly focus on explaining the Manager Live career path

Best Teams to Manage in FC 26

Picking a team to manage in your save can be a daunting task, especially considering that there are more than 750 teams with a whopping 20000+ licensed players in them. The general consensus is to pick whatever club you root for, or if you’re new to this, the club that seems nice; it’s that simple! 

If you want to optimize your experience and learn the ropes without having to delve deeper into more complex mechanics face first, here are the best teams to manage in FC 26:

These are all great if you’re looking for an easy-going first-time experience, but if you’re looking for more of an “underdog” vibe, the true rags-to-riches (or not-so-rags) story, then here are some great teams to manage

Best Managers in FC 26 Career Mode

Having talked about the best teams to manage, we gotta move on to another topic that is as important - managers. Choosing a manager is not as difficult as choosing a team you’re going to play for the rest of the season, though. Some popular managers include:

• Pep Guardiola 
• Ruben Armorim
• Jose Mourinho
• Mikel Arteta
• Ange Postecoglou

Generally speaking, these are the best managers in FC 26 Career Mode in terms of the profitability they bring to your club and also domestic prestige.

From this point on, we will take a look at some game mechanics that people often get confused by or misunderstand altogether, as well as tips and tricks

FC 26 Manager Market

This year, the game presented a new feature called FC 26 Manager Market. When your team starts losing or something bad happens to them due to some Unexpected Events, your manager’s job security inevitably starts to fall. The more it falls, the more it is likely that you will get sacked, but in FC 26 this is not a game over.

Instead, using the new Manager Market feature, you can look at the other clubs and their offers, and - if your Tactical Vision aligns with the club’s vision - you can apply for a job there. The more your manager’s strategies and vision correlate with the club you apply for - the easier it is to get a new job. BLOG20

FC 26 Scouting Guide

Scouting can be pretty complex, but here we’ll break it down for you in this FC 26 Scouting Guide.

In short, the process looks like this.

1. Select a scout you want to hire
2. Set up the needed traits you want a player to have
3. Look up the scouted players in Scout Report and hire them

If you want to understand the process better, here’s a more detailed explanation. When hiring a scout, you need to bear in mind two of their stats - experience and judgment.

The more experienced the scout is, the more players they'll find and the more judgment they have - the better the quality of these players will be. However, be careful with your budget, as some scouts can be quite pricey. Try to always leave at least 1 scout available because they will be able to scout for an individual player. You can also issue the instructions to your scouts by choosing the Department and Position of the player you need, tweaking the age gap of players, and selecting the playstyle. Here’s a little example:

For instance, you want a left-winger attacker. You select these preferences in Position and Department, respectively, then you set up an age gap - let's say 16-24. Then you choose a key role that fits your team. After that, you choose their overall condition, for instance, First Team Prospect and World Class Prospect, and finally, you select their playstyle. It is better not to go too specific at the beginning of your manager career, since it'd be hard for scouts to find the exact player you want.

As your scouts find new players, they will be detailed in the Transfers - Scout Report tab. In there, you’ll be able to see the players' age, height, weight, their foot preference, and their stats. Keep in mind, you will not be given an exact stat. Instead, what you’ll see is an approximation of them. Your best decision here would be to look at their potential OVR. Try to look for a better average stat score, it’s always a safer option in the beginning.

Another thing that players have is Playstyles, which tend to be hidden until you fully scout a player. To do that, simply choose a player you want to pick in your roster and select the Scout option. They will then be scouted for a number of days, and this will reveal all the info about the player, as well as their player traits.

FC 26 Transfers Explained

After you scout enough players, it is time for you to give them offers. Scouting can be really useful to understand what a player's weekly wage is, because sometimes they give you this info. Be careful not to offer them too much or too little, as they will decline your offer and you won’t be able to negotiate with them again for some time!

Another useful thing you have in the game is a Transfer Hub menu. Here you’ll have a list of players that you have shortlisted from the Scout Report menu. This will allow you to track them and keep an eye on the scouting progress.

In this menu, you’ll be able to approach buying a player, approach loaning them, delegate your coach to buy a player, delegate to loan, and just stop scouting them if you’ve changed your mind.

You can also check for the offers you have already sent out in this menu; the received offers and players you have transfer-listed will appear here, too. Don’t forget to get into Transfer History from time to time, since here you’ll see all the transfers that happened throughout the season between the teams around the globe. 

Hopefully, we’ve managed to have FC 26 transfers explained, and you will reach the strongest roster possible.

FC 26 Youth Academy Tips

A powerful tool to grow financially, but it’s so much more than just that. Many people consider it to be one of the best ways to play a career mode, even since your homegrown talents provide a bigger level of uniqueness compared to their more famous counterparts. Here are some FC 26 Youth Academy tips:

• The first thing that you need to do is to hire 3 scouts for your club. The first one will already be hired for you, and their initial stats will depend on the ability and rep of your team. Don’t be afraid to fire a scout if his stats are trash.
• If you start with a less successful team, set the development growth of seniors to fast and leave the youth’s growth rate on normal. If you’re playing with a top-tier site from the get-go, leave everything on normal.
• Prioritize Experience over Judgement if you need quality over quantity, and Judgement over Experience if the situation is vice versa, when working on a tight budget.
• Unlike with scouting for your main team, here you need to look at the highest possible number for OVR stats, but still pay attention to the lowest OVR stat. It is highly unlikely that your player will reach 91 OVR if this is his biggest potential. You’ll be more likely to see him land around the 80s, which is still a great overall stat for most clubs.
• When hiring high-potential 16 - 17-year-olds, ideally you want their overalls be 60+
• Your weaker overalls can be upgraded in a YA tournaments that happen every two months, so play them every time they’re available
• If you’re wondering how to improve players in FC 26, the development plan is your best friend. Since the default Balanced plan focuses not on their strongest sides, but on making them a jack-of-all-trades, try selecting various options and check what stats grow the best. Always look out for the biggest number of stats grown, as well as the player's pace. Sometimes, it’s worth it to sacrifice a stat to keep a good pace.
• Try to keep players in your Youth Academy as long as it is possible, but remember to check your Inbox messages, as players will ask you to be moved to the first team, because if they don’t get promoted, they’ll leave the club completely and disappear from the game

If you really want your player to succeed and grow beyond his potential, even to the 90’s OVR stats, you can abuse the loan mechanic. When you move your YA player to the first team, the dynamic potential mechanic starts getting applied. Be careful, though, as in lower leagues, this is a player killer. At this point, loan out your players as soon as possible. It quickly improves players’ potential, their OVR stats, and of course, raises their market value. Be wary, as this is probably not working as intended, but considering this has existed since FC 25, maybe it’s how EA imagined it?

Best Young Players FC 26 Career Mode

If you don’t want to get into the Youth Academy mode, but still want to look for new players, fret not, there are plenty of young talents ready to be introduced to your team with little to no effort in growing them:

Trading most of these players is really cheap, and they provide a great boost for your team. BLOG20

FC 26 Training Plans

When you are creating or tweaking your team, you can select the tactical vision in tactical presets for them. This dictates how the AI-controlled players will behave, but it influences not only that. One of the major ways to improve your player’s stats is not only a development plan, but also selecting a proper coach for their training programs. Let us explain FC 26 training plans.

There are four coaching subdivisions - Attack, Midfield, Defense, and Goalkeeping.

When choosing a coach for your team, you need to choose the one who fits your tactical vision. So if your team’s tactical preset is Balanced, you should look for the coach who has the same vision. The coaches differ in their knowledge level - the higher it is, the more skills they cover.

Now let’s return to tactical presets. There’s nothing wrong with default presets, but you can always squeeze out more performance out of your athletes with the right settings. If you want a more in-depth guide on formations, read it here, but if you want to brush up on them, here are our meta FC 26 tactical presets:

Career Mode Long-term Projects FC 26

With so many things at hand, you might be wondering where to start. In this game, the sky is the limit. You've got tons of content you can dabble your feet in. 

Our recommendation would be to start off by running a pre-established club, pick the best manager, play at the easiest difficulty, find the limits, test the waters, then gradually go up, turn off all the helpers, and raise the difficulty bar. Try to create a club where every player is a 90+ OVR, then defeat your rival team.

The ultimate goal is to build a managerial dynasty, turning your club into a powerhouse for many seasons to come. After that, try to grow your own team of young prodigies and finally - move to the Ultimate Team, where the skills you have acquired will be tested. And when you do that, be sure that we will be here with a guide just for you.

Conclusion

With the introduction of new gameplay features such as Manager Market, Authentic gameplay, Manager Live challenges and Unexpected Events, the gameplay became deeper than ever, and the amount of information starts to feel truly disorienting, so hopefully, with this Extensive Guide to FC 26 Career Mode, we were able to make it a little more processable. Just remember to take things slowly - this is not a race, it’s a marathon. Or, well, football, to be more precise.

F.A.Q.