EA Sports is certainly not holding back on its promises for Madden NFL 26, presenting "the biggest Franchise Mode update we've made in over a decade".
The changes to this year's iteration are centered around two aspects: Improving the players' immersion in their role as coaches and providing more variety throughout a campaign. A third pillar is of a technical nature, with EA emphasizing that it has put a lot of time into improving the mode's loading times. Last year, one of the biggest points of criticism was the amount of time players wasted staring at loading screens.
Immersion starts with character customization and EA has greatly expanded the options in this regard. Players can choose from 200 additional heads, over 50 new shirts, 15 pants, and 40 shoes for more than 30,000 possible combinations. Coaches can follow three archetypes -- Offensive Guru, Defensive Genius, or Development Wizard -- that come with their own starting abilities and unlockable skills. Existing coaches, too, will fall under these categories and feature tailored ability kits to reflect their real-life counterparts. Completing in-game goals will enable players to level up their coach from one to 50.
These abilities are divided into Gameday Abilities and Season Abilities, allowing users to steer their team in more tactical or strategic ways, be it through passive stat boosts or more active moment-to-moment decisions.
Franchise Mode's weekly strategy part has been redesigned to give these abilities a stage to shine on and emphasize the role preparation plays in the sport. EA wants players to feel like they're engaged in a chess match against the opposing head coach every week. Not every coach can be great at everything, so clever players will use coordinators and staff members -- which all come with their own abilities -- to complement their weaknesses. This also means that players shouldn't just focus their attention on their own coach, but help their staff members reach their personal goals and level up as well.
In addition to results on the field, decisions made during events have a huge impact on the approval rating and relationships of a coach -- and, ultimately, their job security.
Players can also bring extra Playsheets to a game, temporarily expanding their Playbook in preparation for specific opponents, once again emphasizing the strategic aspect. The already revealed player traits in Madden 26 will help guide coaches through this, as they'll provide a direction on how the AI might behave and plan its own game.
Players can figure out the traits of key athletes on the opposing side and plan appropriate counters to never lose the upper hand. The same goes for the opposing coaches. As revealed previously, Madden 26 has fed tons of real NFL data into the game to make coaches think similar to their real selves -- so any avid fan can do the corresponding prep work, especially with the help of the game's AI assistant.