Critics gave EA Sports FC 27 a 76. The people playing it say 45.

EA Sports FC 27 opened to Ultimate Edition early access on September 18 and released worldwide on September 25, on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, both Nintendo Switch consoles, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It comes from EA Vancouver. The critics have spoken: the Metascore for the PlayStation 5 version is 76 from 40 critic reviews, and the PC version sits at 75 from 8. The people playing it have spoken too, and they say something else. The audience score this morning is 45 from 1,411 reactions at very high confidence. That is a 31 point gap, and this is what it is made of.

We measure what people actually say about a game in public social media conversations and Steam reviews, classified and scored nightly with the sample size and confidence beside every number. Nobody clicks a star. The score is weighted toward people who have played the game over people who have only heard about it, which matters here, because the people who have played it are the unhappiest group of all.

Two numbers from two different groups

The two scores are not measuring the same thing, so the fairest way to put them side by side is as shares. Of the 40 critic reviews, 30 are positive, 9 are mixed and 1 is negative. Of the 1,411 reactions behind our score, 37% are positive and 48% are negative. The critics mostly liked it. The audience found a lot to complain about, and the complaints are not coming from people who skipped it.

Among the 1,097 reactions from people who said they had played it, 36% were positive and 58% were negative. Among the 144 from people passing on something they had heard, 25% were positive and only 13% were negative; most of the secondhand talk was neither. The harshest verdicts come from people with the game running, which is the opposite of a pile-on from people who never bought it.

Early access was the kinder week

The Ultimate Edition crowd got the game a week early, and they were not delighted either, but they were kinder than what followed. Across early access, September 17 to 24, we counted 886 reactions: 34% positive, 42% negative. Across the first four days of worldwide release, September 25 to 28, we counted 615: 32% positive, 49% negative. Release day itself was the busiest day of all with 270 reactions, 43% of them negative. Then the weekend turned: Saturday, September 26, was 56% negative, and Sunday, September 27, was 52%. Those are the only two days since early access opened when more than half of everything said about the game was negative.

The score itself has barely moved. Its first readings on the afternoon of release day were 49 and then 46 as the early access backlog was counted, and it has been 45 every morning since, on a sample that grew from 1,123 to 1,411. A score that holds that still on that many reactions is not a first impression any more.

What the 45 is made of

Gameplay is the most discussed part of the game, with 840 mentions, and it scores 49: split down the middle. Everything below it is worse. Performance scores 15 on 471 mentions, the lowest of any aspect. Value scores 24 on 431 mentions, and the value complaint is the familiar one for an annual sports game: people paying full price for something that feels like an update. Difficulty scores 21, multiplayer 29. The only aspect above 50 is the story, at 57 on a thin 114 mentions.

The modes are the good news. The new The Grounds mode is the most mentioned name after EA, 124 times, and 49% of those mentions are positive. Career Mode is at 48% on 44 mentions and Clubs at 47% on 19. Ultimate Team is the exception, at 22% positive on 64 mentions. Passing, a gameplay detail that came up 19 times, is at 11%. And the company takes the blame: EA is the most mentioned name in the conversation, 126 times, and only 10% of those mentions are positive. EA Sports is at 21% on 99 and EA Vancouver at 16% on 55.

A big crowd that never gets to a thumbs-up majority

None of this is keeping people away. On Steam alone the game peaked at 90,688 players online on release day, 90,481 on Saturday and 95,985 on Sunday, and on Twitch it drew a peak of 167,639 viewers on release day and 133,825 on Sunday. The crowd is enormous. It is just not happy.

Steam reviews make the point cleanly, because every Steam review comes with a thumbs up or down and the hours played. Of the 1,070 Steam reviews in our sample, 44% are thumbs up. Reviewers under two hours are the harshest, at 25% of 120. Between two and twenty hours the rate climbs to 48% of 674, and past twenty hours it is 42% of 276. No group of players gets to half. Time with the game softens the verdict a little, then the long-haul players settle just below where the middle group sits.

Where 45 sits

Of the 242 games we score on at least 100 reactions, 6 score lower than 45. The closest comparison is the other big annual sports release of the season: NBA 2K27, out August 28, is a 42 from 1,608 reactions, with 35% positive and 51% negative. EA Sports UFC 6, out June 12, is a 62 from 123. The yearly football and basketball games are landing in the same place with the people who buy them.

A Metascore is a fair reading of what reviewers thought after their time with a game. The audience score is what the people who paid for it say when they talk about it among themselves. For EA Sports FC 27 the two are 31 points apart, and the gap has a shape: the modes are fine, the game underneath them runs badly, the price feels high for what changed, and the name on the box draws most of the anger.

EA Sports FC 27's score updates every night as new reactions come in. The live number, the trend, and the full breakdown: See EA Sports FC 27's live Real Score