Career mode has received a major face lift in FIFA 16

Let's face it: Career mode in both FIFA 14 and FIFA 15 left something to be desired. Granted, the excuse was that the game had to be stripped down a bit as the jump in generation was made. Most fans of the game probably cried foul, but it is what it is.

Now, FIFA 16 is getting a massive face lift and it looks absolutely glorious. There's a lot to pick apart here, so let's weave our way through this and discuss.

Pre-Season Tournaments

If the way I play career mode is the norm, then pre-season matches are largely ignored. However, give the promise of extra funds for winning a pre-season friendly tournament and you've captured my attention. In the upcoming title, players will now have the opportunity to receive invites to various pre-season tournaments, with a few examples shown below.

The names might be generic, but who cares? This isn't Rory McIlroy PGA Tour where we have to have authentic names and courses. This is a nice change to the boring three to four match pre-season that is auto-generated by the CPU for a player to basically just blow through in order to get to the regular season.

Player Training

Returning to the franchise is Player Training, so for those of you out there who felt it necessary to spend hours on end going through all of those skills before matches, this is where that time is going to pay off.

Looking at the interfaces above, it appears as though players will have the option of training the players themselves, or simply doing a simulation and letting the CPU decide how well a player did on training. This is yanked right out of FIFA 2014 World Cup and I love it. The training was a ton of fun, challenging, and players could receive a serious boost if the training was ran enough times. Youth players may not be totally worthless anymore!

The Rest of the Changes

There's a checklist at the bottom of the article I linked above with some tidbits of information, and that includes the following:

• Scout Reports - After scouting a player reports are available to you now for an entire calendar year before expiring vs three months in FIFA 15.

A nice little feature to throw in, given that some scouting reports were easily forgotten if they were ran at the beginning of a season. Players shouldn't be punished for doing their work early.

• Transfer Budget -Transfer budgets are now more realistically tailored to the club you're using in Career Mode. Also, a percentage of the remaining budget from the previous season will carry over to the next. and will vary based on where your club finished in regards to season goals.

I'm curious as to how this will play out. The budgets, for the most part, have been pretty sporadic and some of the smaller clubs were just not plausible to do anything with because of this problem. The carry over of budget funds will make players happy again. It was infuriating to save up a ton of money from one season, only to not be able to spend it because a new season started with a new budget. What good was winning the Champions League and not getting to spend that dough?

• Loans - Short loans have increased from three to six months and there is now an option to issue two-year loans.

Nothing else to say, other than "it's about time."

• Friendly Subs - You will be able to issue an unlimited number of substitutions during friendly matches.

See the above comment for "Loans" and reapply here.

• More Realistic Transfers - While the transfer window is open, we have tuned the number of ‘high-profile’ moves by big players to better match the number of changes that typically happen in the real-world.

How many times did a season get started up and transfers involving Sergio Aguero to Real Madrid pop up? David de Gea to PSG? Eden Hazard to Anywhere? Glad to see this is being curbed.

• Improved Player Transfer Values - We’ve addressed values of players to better match the real-world transfer market.

Another positive. The best example I have of this is when I was playing with Fulham and attempted to buy Benjamin Stambouli from Tottenham Hotspur. He had a value of £6.5m and was rated an 80 overall. I matched the value and put the bid in, only to receive a response that the club's valuation of the player was now £43m. Thanks for changing this!

There's a lot more to come in the future. Hopefully we get better contract negotiations, but for now, this is all good news.