The interview bits in this article have been edited for clarity.
Adding to its line of football games, Electronic Arts’ sports publisher EA Sports is back with FC Empires, a football club management simulator for mobile devices. Providing a more macro view of the beautiful game, it focuses on building a football empire from the ground up, serving as a social, strategy-focused standalone title separate from the EA Sports FC series.

Zooming out from just the players you see on the pitch, you can create your football club and access unprecedented customisation, including building important club facilities like training pitches, stadiums, club merchandise stores, and more. These infrastructures can then be upgraded to spur business and growth, with players investing their in-game cash into the process, which can be sped up with premium items.
After selecting and curating a suite of coaches that will enhance matchday performance and recovery of your squad, the parallels from EA’s iconic Ultimate Team category become prominent. You get drip-fed transfers — akin to opening up player packs in EA Sports FC 25 — where you have free reign to pick players based on their nationalities, real-life teams and leagues that they play in to maximise team chemistry and get stat boosts.

Taking a bit from the ever-popular Football Manager series, players will then set the formation and tactics, and watch the game play out from the sidelines. It’s nowhere near as detailed as the options and in-depth tactical adjustments available in Football Manager, making FC Empires ideal for those who can’t stand the twitchiness of EA Sports FC 25 and prefer a more laid-back and casual squad-building football experience.
As they trod on and grow their reputation, AI-controlled squads can be invited to visit the home stadium for exhibition matches, while venturing forth into the world and competing against other players garners new fans and club worth. There’s no need to do everything alone, either — the Guild feature allows you to team up with your friends and contest areas of the game’s world map by facing off against other guilds.

“In FC Empires, our dream’s bigger,” shares executive producer Lucas Lu in an online media session that Geek Culture attended. “For players and fans, you can play any role in the football world; for example, you can become a club owner, managing the entire business of the football club, or you can see yourself as a player scout, seeking the right talent for the team.”
“Most importantly, as a football fan [and] a football lover, you [can] stand alongside your fans and become the champion of these people,” he adds, describing the game as having “unlimited imagination” in terms of the role one plays in the sporting world.
EA Sports FC Empires is now available on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store in Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand.
Everything changed when his parents bought him a PlayStation 2 for Christmas. Since then, he’s been hooked on all things esports, video games, and music. If he’s not livestreaming his shenanigans, he’s probably out taking mirror-selfies with his friends, vigorously debating over the Internet’s Meme of the Year.