When I think back to the most enjoyable sports gaming experiences of my life I vividly recall two games:

-NCAA Football 11 Online Dynasty
-College Hoops 2K8 Offline Career Mode

Despite being wholly different games and sports, they both provided a level of enjoyment that's rarely been matched. College Hoops 2K8 gave players one of the deepest offline career modes to date. You could start your career in a small conference before using the Coaching Carousel to get your dream job. NCAA 11 took a fairly decent offline dynasty and took it all online. Battling for recruits and conference supremacy was ratcheted up a couple levels in an online setting.

So yeah, at this point you might be asking what this article is doing in the footie forum. Well, it leads me to what I believe is the biggest omission in FIFA: Online Manager Mode.

Online Manager Mode

FIFA has historically been a game where once you learn the CPU’s tendencies, you can quickly dominate and rack up trophy after trophy. With the ability to use sites such as sofifa.com, you can scour the lesser leagues for those potential stars, stockpiling them at cut-rate prices until they develop. At that point, you can either sell them for a huge profit or play them in the starting 11 and reap the benefits.

There are no transfer-wage battles between you and a rival club, only niggling transfer fee and contract wage negotiations that rarely see a player not sign with your club. Even with a mid-table side, you can quickly overcome budget shortcomings by smartly wheeling and dealing your way to top place finishes, long cup runs and the eventual budget increases that come with them. While still enjoyable, league rivals often drift by the wayside as you leave them stuck in the mud.

What if you could replace a couple of those CPU-led sides with a few of your buddies? Playing with trusted friends eliminates most negatives that come with random online matches where people often attempt cheap exploits in an attempt to win at all costs. Playing with friends of similar skill levels would also stop you from coasting to league titles, domestic cups and European glory. If you’re like me, most of your buddies are fans of the big English clubs (Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal, and so on). Starting a Career Mode with one of those giants usually becomes too easy too quickly -- that’s if you don’t get fired your first year as you get better at the game. Imagine competing with your buddies for the next Brazilian or Argentinean superstar as you prepare for a derby match against your mate.

Implementation is often the reason why we hear that Online Manager Mode does not exist as of yet, and to be frank, it’s a lame excuse. Sure, things such as Transfer Deadline Day and a schedule that could include games on any day of the week would make advancing the days hard. However, games such as Madden, Football Manager and NBA 2K all have robust online career modes -- not to mention NCAA Football which debuted the mode nearly five years ago. Timeframes (for example, three days to play, scout, train, and so on) during which the player must perform their managerial duties could be implemented to help advance the lengthy soccer seasons.

EA Canada could surely use of that FIFA Ultimate Team cash to fund the development of a new mode that would likely require additional programmers and infrastructure upgrades/hardening. I highly doubt that pulling players away from Ultimate Team is something EA would go for, so if it were too debut in FIFA 17, I would expect micro transactions to rear their ugly head in some way (though to be fair, EA has been good about not doing it with other online career modes).

With that being said, in the age of online gaming, the potential for a mode like this would most certainly take off and get people playing the game even longer, which is the goal for any developer.


How interested would you be in a FIFA Online Manager Mode?