There aren't any big player decisions to make or relationships to build. There isn't the feeling of chasing a cup among the veterans on the team or climbing the depth charts for the rookies. The automatically-generated league bulletins don't even seem informed of the FC 24 Coins player's accomplishments. There needs to be something.
"If people don't like pay to play, they should play one of the other modes." The problem is that there is nearly no effort on those modes. The work is all invested in Ultimate Team. And the concept of Ultimate Team is fun! Putting together a fantasy team and working hard for rewards is rewarding.
But it becomes no fun when the player's fantasy team is simply outbought by an opponent. Not everybody wants to put up a second mortgage to be competitive. The money-barrier is not fun, no matter how profitable it is for the corporation that created it.
Aggressive tackling is just a good way to get a red card right now. Online players are waiting for an excited opponent to try and go for a quick steal, so they have their pass or dribble move ready. While that strategy is respectable, it's made defense very boring.
The passive tackling abilities are alright, but they take away from the excitement of trying to get a nice steal or block. After the fifth-or-so red card, players just give up aggressive tackling entirely, abandoning a dimension of the game that deserves to be realized.
With such a lackluster career mode, the natural suspicion should be that all of the resources are put into a club mode. These suspicions appear to be warranted when there is an option to create a club. Sounds exciting.
Sadly, that excitement fades immediately after designing the team's colors and logos. The cheap FIFA Coins games trudge along, no decisions feel as weighty as reality, and there just isn't much available to invest in. There is no way to confirm that the poor single player modes are trying to drive traffic into modes where players need to spend money, but what else are gamers supposed to think.