Why EA Nerfed SBCs & Evolutions — And What Changes in FC 27
If FC 26's SBCs and Evolutions felt stingier than you remembered, there's a specific, stated reason for it — and EA says FC 27 is meant to land somewhere more balanced.
This explanation is attributed to Jamey Cane (@FUT_Economist), who reads as an EA game-economy designer answering a community question directly. It's not a formal pitch-notes article, so we're tagging it as a credible leak rather than fully official — but its tone and content line up closely with EA's own official "smaller attribute-upgrade scale" language elsewhere in the FC 27 Deep Dive.
The actual reason, in EA's own words
In FC 26, players using third-party SBC and fodder-generation tools could progress their squads in a way EA considered unbalanced compared to players who didn't use them. To limit that unfair advantage, EA deliberately tuned down the FC 26 SBC experience broadly — both the upgrades granted by SBC player items and how repeatable upgrade SBCs were.
EA's own framing was blunt about the tradeoff: "this is far from ideal" — SBCs are core to how players upgrade squads and recycle unwanted content, so a broad, blanket nerf was treated as a stopgap rather than a real fix.
Streamlined SBCs are the actual fix
The new Streamlined SBC format — pick-and-score instead of build-a-squad — exists specifically to remove friction from the legacy SBC experience. It's described as one tool among several planned to address the underlying problem, not a standalone solution.
The stated goal
EA's framing, close to verbatim: the aim is for "all players to operate on an even playing field" — in other words, the FC 27 Evolution and SBC rebalance is explicitly a response to third-party tooling, not just generic year-over-year power-curve tuning.
Asked directly whether SBCs will be more balanced next year, the answer was yes — the broader Evolution changes below, combined with the SBC changes, are meant together to land FC 27 in a more balanced spot than FC 26.
Four mechanisms EA is using to rebalance Evolutions
From related developer commentary, four concrete levers EA says it's "broadly considering" to bring Evolutions into better balance with the rest of FUT:
- Lower power ceiling. Evo items can still be made powerful, but the number that can reach top-tier-campaign-item level will be meaningfully lower than in FC 26.
- More position-specific requirements. Expect more frequent restrictions that stop players stacking boosts that don't fit a position's archetype — fewer defensive boosts on attacker evos, for instance — cutting down on "perfectly well-rounded" min-maxed items.
- Higher cost for the strongest evos. Coin and engagement cost for evolutions that produce especially powerful items is likely to increase, bringing the investment more in line with what powerful items cost elsewhere in FUT.
- Fewer "free lunch" evos. Expect fewer evolutions that hand out big stat upgrades without raising overall rating — the kind of sleeper stat-stick evo that dodges normal rating creep.
Once real FC 27 evolution data exists, expect requirement logic to lean much more heavily on positions and excluded positions than it does today, and expect fewer evolutions overall that feel like a "free" upgrade. We'll adjust our Evo Lab's eligibility checks accordingly as soon as real data is available.