Kylian Mbappé landed on the cover of EA Sports FC 27 back in July, and for about a day the story was purely about football. Then someone noticed the small print: for the first time in the franchise’s history, FC 27 carries a PEGI 16 rating instead of the PEGI 3 badge every FIFA and FC game has worn since anyone can remember. The reason wasn’t violence or language. It was Ultimate Team.
FUT, as most of the community calls it, has always been the mode that pays EA’s bills. Open a pack, hope for a decent card, repeat. It is possible to build a squad without spending a penny, trading and grinding coins instead, but anyone who has actually tried knows it’s the long way round. Pan-European Game Information’s updated ratings framework now treats “paid random items” as a default 16+ trigger, and FUT ticks that box cleanly. According to the BBC, critics have compared the mode to gambling for years, with recent research finding the two “blurred the lines” enough to worry regulators, even though EA has pushed back hard on the comparison and the UK government has so far declined to bring loot boxes under the Gambling Act.
That pushback is worth sitting with for a second, because it’s not really about whether FUT feels like gambling. It’s about what happens when it doesn’t behave like it. A loot box gives you a probability nobody discloses in plain terms, wrapped inside a game you already paid £70 for, aimed at players as young as the platform allows. There’s no age verification stopping a 16-year-old from opening pack after pack once the game is installed. There’s no return-to-player percentage published anywhere. You find out what you got after the money’s gone, and the only regulator watching is a classification board deciding who’s allowed to buy the box in the first place, not what’s inside it.
A rundown of the best online slot sites in the UK makes the contrast plain: a licensed operator has to publish exactly what its games pay back, cap how much a player can stake, and verify age at sign-up before anyone spins a reel — a level of disclosure FUT’s card packs still don’t offer.
It’s a fair point, and the numbers back it up in an unexpected direction. UK online slots aren’t some fringe corner of the gambling market shrinking under regulatory pressure; they’re growing under it. Gross gambling yield from online slots rose 12% year-on-year to £773 million in the most recent reporting quarter, with the number of spins climbing to 25.1 billion, even after stake limits kicked in for every age group. Sessions got shorter and less intense (spins per session dropped from 136 to 124, and the time spent per session fell too, according to industry coverage of the figures), but more people played, and the yield went up anyway. That’s a market absorbing tighter rules without collapsing, which is roughly the opposite of the “unregulated wild west” framing loot boxes sometimes get lumped in with by comparison. FUT’s own numbers, by contrast, aren’t published with anything like that granularity; EA’s most recent financial report only described Ultimate Team as responsible for a “substantial portion” of the $5.5bn a year it makes from add-on content across its entire games catalogue, with no breakdown of pack spend, odds, or player loss rates offered alongside it.
None of this means FUT packs are secretly a slot machine in a football kit, and EA’s defence that nobody has to spend money to compete isn’t nothing. But the PEGI change is an admission that random-chance purchase mechanics deserve scrutiny wherever they show up, and it’s fair to ask why one side of that comparison operates with full disclosure and the other doesn’t. FC 27 launches on September 25 with a rebuilt transfer market and its priciest edition yet at £140. Whether the pack odds get any more transparent by then is a separate question, and going by the last few PEGI cycles, probably not one EA is in a hurry to answer.
We’ve been tracking the bigger changes coming to the game in our FC 27 features roundup, and the pack economy is shaping up to be the one nobody at EA wants to talk about on record.
