FIFA 17 career mode: Total Club Management first thoughts

When it comes to FIFA 17 career mode, the biggest announcement at Gamescom 2016 was Total Club Management.

EA had their FUT Live event at Gamescom and perhaps unsurprisingly given the name of the event, they barely covered any career mode news at all.

However, a few days before, they did release some info on career mode developments. The guys from Futhead also got to try it out and reported back afterwards. So let’s take a look at Total Club Management and what it means for career mode in FIFA 17.

Total Club Management

Each team in career mode will now have a “unique personality”, in EA’s words. The board expectations will no longer be simple league- and cup-based tasks. You’ll have to do well in five different categories: domestic success, continental success, brand exposure, financial success and youth development.

The first two are obvious enough – finish mid table, win the cup, etc. The same sort of thing as what we’re used to in FIFA career modes, although it’s not really like EA were going to change them.

FIFA 17 career mode: Total Club Management first thoughts

Each club will have its own objectives in Total Club Management

Brand exposure is a little different. Getting good results, signing big-name players and taking the club on tour can help to raise this. The board will make it clear what they want – ‘tour North America’, for example, or ‘sign a crucial first team striker’. It’s something new for career mode and sounds really promising, especially for road to glory careers. Imagine taking a League Two team up through the ranks and eventually increasing their fan base all over the world (assuming your board objectives scale properly in this way, of course).

But if you’ve seen the Futhead video then you’ll know they had a bit of trouble with this because the game didn’t give them any other help on to raise the brand exposure. It named a couple of things, but everything else they had to work out themselves. There will probably be more ways to raise your exposure, and I’ll of course bring you guys more info on this and will probably write a guide on it in due course.

FIFA 17 career mode: Total Club Management first thoughts

For a world famous team like Real Madrid, brand exposure is critical in FIFA 17

The next objective is financial success. Your team now has a ‘club worth’. On the one hand you have expenses like player and scout wages, maintaining your stadium, youth facilities and travel costs for the team. On the other you have income like ticket sales, loans and transfers, sponsorships and merchandising. The goals you get set in this category can go across multiple seasons, like doubling the club’s worth over two seasons. Again though, it’s not yet clear how you can affect these numbers besides getting good results. Once again, it sounds like a good idea that perhaps hasn’t quite been finished yet. Rest assured I’ll delve into this and write up a guide for you guys when I get my hands on FIFA 17.

FIFA 17 career mode: Total Club Management first thoughts

Total Club Management means it’s important to balance expenses and income

The final category, and perhaps the one I’m most interested in, is youth development. Your board will set you goals like growing a youth player a certain number of OVR points across the season, and playing them in a certain number of games. I like that – it’s encouraging you to make use of the academy and play the young prospects that you find. Hopefully it will introduce more people to the youth scouting system who may not have cared much for it in previous years.

You can also get objectives to make a certain amount of money from selling youth players. This, I’m not entirely sold on. After all, the main reason I scout players is to get future superstars in my team and keep them there, thus helping me win trophies. I don’t necessarily want to sell players I’ve developed. Part of the fun of scouting is powering a low rated youth player into a club legend. Although I can of course see that some players would want to operate a youth academy in this way.

FIFA 17 career mode: Total Club Management first thoughts

Your manager rating changes based on how well you meet your goals in FIFA 17

All this ties together in the form of a manager rating – a combination of what the board and fans think of you. Your actions can directly affect this rating, but the problem is that it’s not entirely clear why they affect it. Refusing to sell a player might see your rating decline, but without an explanation as to why the board or fans disapproved of it. Hopefully EA will polish that up a bit before the final release.

I will also be looking to see how solid these objectives are. Can you ‘reload’ them and get different ones for the same club each time you start a new career with them? What’s the threshold for the board’s strictness? Will you fail an objective if your youth player only develops by 4 points instead of the required 5? Because if overtraining players still stunts their physical growth, and the only way to grow a player to reach the board’s objectives is to heavily train them, then we might have a problem.

FIFA 17 career mode: Total Club Management first thoughts

There are also more options to change your manager’s appearance in FIFA 17

Overall I’m cautiously optimistic about these changes to career mode. It does seem as though EA are trying to make the mode more interesting, although sadly there don’t seem to be many changes to the underlying scouting system. But if EA can smooth out these problems before the game gets released, we could have an entertaining – though not groundbreaking – career mode experience in FIFA 17.