EA Sports FC Empires looks to take on Football Manager with weird 4X strategy that’s Ultimate Team meets Clash of Clans

EA Sports has just released the early access for FC Empires, a new football 4X Strategy game that’s kind of like Football Manager meets Clash of Clans.

It’s available on iOS and Android in Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand right now, with a global release scheduled at some point in the near future.

FC Empires focuses as much on the business side of modern football as the sport itself, tasking players with building their club up into a worldwide superpower with smart merchandising, the best medical and scouting facilities and experienced coaching staff.

We’ve played a closed alpha version of FC Empires prior to this release, and it was strange and strangely compelling in equal measure. The different mechanics will be instantly recognisable to anyone that’s played either EA Sports FC 25’s Ultimate Team and any other mobile strategy game like Clash of Clans or even The Simpsons: Tapped Out.

You invest your in-game cash into building up infrastructure, which is constructed in real-world time but can be sped up with premium items. That infrastructure then has in-game utility, like the hospital speeds up the recovery time of injured players. So far, so very mobile strategy.

Building your squad is where EA’s Ultimate Team comes in, as you get a drip feed of “transfers” like opening up packs in EA Sports FC 25. You can then mix and match different players based on their nationality, real-life team and the league they play in, to build up team chemistry for stat boosts.

Where the Football Manager similarity appears is in the match engine, where you don’t control each player individually, but rather set the formation and tactics and watch the game play out from the sidelines.

FC Empires is much more streamlined than the in-depth tactical plans you can devise in Football Manager, but it’s clear that EA is targeting a similar kind of football fan who’s turned off by the fast, twitch-intensive hundred-miles-a-minute gameplay of EA Sports FC, but enjoys the squad building and tactics, albeit more casually.

Once you’ve settled on your squad, you can either invite AI controlled squads to visit your home stadium for exhibition matches, or strike out into the wider world to compete against other players, with the victor winning the adoration of more fans throughout the world and increasing their club’s worth.

It’s a pitch that’s about as far away from “proper” football as you can get. The notion that you can become a fan of a team because they’re winning is in and of itself utterly alien to most avid supporters. Supporting Leeds United makes me miserable, ruins my weekend and spikes my blood pressure – I love it.

But there’s no getting away from the fact that FC Empires is a confluence of two key game mechanics that have proven to be both incredibly popular and compelling on a global scale – plus, it’s worth mentioning, literally addictive in many unfortunate cases.

FC Empires has an official website with more information, as well as an official Facebook and Discord you can follow for release announcements.