EA Sports FC 26 is free on Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 for a week

Nintendo has announced its latest Game Trial. This time, to celebrate the World Cup, EA Sports FC 26 is free from June 18 until June 24.

Players can download and play EA Sports FC 26 for the duration of the Game Trial. When the trial elapses, the game will become unplayable, though players will retain their save data.

While clearly timed for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, EA Sports FC 26 doesn’t hold any of the license rights to the tournament, following the public falling out between EA and FIFA some years ago. 

Currently, EA Sports FC 26 is running in-game events for “The World’s Game,” which are all based on the current tournament, without ever explicitly referring to it. The game does have the license to all of the teams competing in the World Cup, as well as the officially licensed kits.

Football Manager 26 has the full license to this year’s tournament.

Due to the lack of a traditional EA Sports-led crossover for this year’s tournament, FIFA has released its own game, which was released last week on Netflix.

VGC’s one-star review called it, “a woefully undercooked effort that really doesn’t do the real thing justice.”

“If this is supposed to be a genuine competitor to EA Sports FC’s league title, it doesn’t even manage to string two passes together at this stage. Netflix appears to be suggesting it’ll evolve over time, so subsequent games might one day become so accomplished that they’ll have us looking back at this and chuckling at its humble beginnings.

“At the present moment, however, given that this is supposed to be the official video game of the World Cup, we’re not smiling.