Madden NFL is touted as having new and exciting presentation elements with every new installment in the series. These elements, such as commentary, field-level camera work, and halftime shows, are inconsistent at best and tend to leave a lot to be desired, especially when you compare them to the same aspects of games like NBA 2K and MLB The Show. But the latest presentation gaffe in Madden 25 feels like a strangely unforced error.
In the most recent patch, the EA Orlando team introduced the Team Pass, a new battle pass-like cosmetic rewards tree that offers both free and paid unlockables that amount to player banner customization options. You can unlock things like profile pictures, backgrounds, and borders, just like you can in Call of Duty or many other games. These cosmetics are all centered around one particular team of a player’s choosing and are meant to be proudly displayed in-game.
In practice, this means the scorebug in any game replaces the logo of the team you’re playing as with imagery based on the team you chose in the Team Pass. This is a reasonably innocuous feature for game modes like the arcadey Superstar Showdown and the fantasy-sports-inspired Ultimate Team (MUT). However, forcing this cosmetic change in Franchise mode quickly becomes an eyesore given players are tied to the hip with one particular team–and not necessarily the same team as that in their Team Pass–and are much more likely to be interested in simulating the product they see on TV.
You can’t change your chosen team once you’ve opted into the Team Pass, though the game suggests a new Team Pass will be sold in a few months during the next live-service season. The Team Pass seems built on the assumption that players will choose their favorite team and that it will be the same team they tend to use in various game modes. It’s arguably a fair assumption some of the time, but Franchise is a mode in which players often purposely take on a team other than the one close to their heart.
Maybe they want a rebuilding project, or they want to create a custom team in a new city with a new name and uniforms, or maybe, like in the case of my online league, there are 32 players and few of us will get our favorite team. My league plays year-round, switching to the latest Madden every August. Our teams become our identity. To have an unrelated team tied to our long-term persona is a jarring feature the moment you first see it on the screen. Why would I want a team other than the one I’m controlling and the one I’m facing to be featured on the scorebug?
In the worst case, the scorebug now features up to four teams: the two teams playing each other, identified by their three-letter abbreviation, and as many as two more teams that have overtaken the team logo spaces and replaced them with potentially several extravagant cosmetics. I don’t know how it got through testing. It’s kind of like if the scorebug’s remaining timeout nodes were changed to various emojis. Can I figure it out soon enough? Yeah, sure. But does it improve anything? Does it make sense? Does it look nice, the way cosmetic options for sale within a game should? Nope. Nobody looked at a game between the Steelers and Ravens in which the scorebug suggests–in Stroop test fashion–it’s actually the Seahawks and Patriots and thought something was wrong?
Similarly perplexing is what happens if you opt out of the Team Pass entirely. The game then applies a default logo to your profile, the NFL shield, so you end up looking like the NFL franchise embodiment of Rob Lowe, giving games a strange one-team-versus-the-league aesthetic at a glance. This is easier to read than the possibly very busy illustrations the Team Pass may grant you, but it still replaces a sensible team-specific logo with the default NFL logo as a means of getting you to care about the Team Pass. It’s the equivalent of NBA 2K’s annual bland, brown shirt for all new create-a-players filtering into the game. It’s purposely unappealing to inspire you to spend money on something nicer. But in this case, the nicer option isn’t so nice.
There are bigger problems in the world. Heck, there are even bigger problems in the Madden world. I haven’t lost sight of that. But so often, better, more consistent sports sims sweat the small stuff to such an appreciable degree that it’s exciting to see what those games will roll out with each new game. In the case of Madden, I have been conditioned to merely hope the game doesn’t permanently erase my hundreds of hours of Franchise saved data or that I can eventually turn off an unbalanced mechanic that never improved across several iterations.
I’m not interested in buying the Team Pass, but I acknowledge that it could be fun and harmless for a portion of the massive community to chase these rewards. Every live-service game has a mandate to be what I like to call “a little more Fortnite.” Customization and cosmetic brags like a rare skin or profile picture inspire tons of spending and countless hours played. Maybe Madden will enjoy a similar outcome with its first Team Pass. But in a mode like online Franchise, in which players already painstakingly tweak the game’s sliders, rules, and behaviors to cover up some of the inherited blemishes the series drops in our laps, these MUT-like touches just get in the way of what is often already a head-scratching experience.
My hope for this new cosmetic overhaul is that the EA Orlando team will find another place for us to show off our player banners–a non-obstructive, non-headache-inducing place. Additional revenue streams are unavoidable in many games today, especially those operating like a live service such as Madden, so I get that this stuff is here to stay, but does it have to stay in my way?