FIFA 12

Fortunately, the EA Sports Club is all about the club fans support in real life, rather than the team they prefer to play with in FIFA 12. Leicester City fans, for example are able to play with any club in order to help their beloved Foxes in the league table. The Sports Club is also bolstered with scenarios and live challenges, similar to the Scenario Mode in FIFA World Cup 2010 in that they follow real-world storylines. However, these will be season-long features and will be available to players at no additional cost.

Then there's Career Mode which follows the rubric laid out in FIFA 11, in which players can choose between being a player, a manager or a player/manager. Scouting has received a bit of a tweak; players can dispatch scouts to regions around the world to look at potential stars - as in previous FIFA titles - and receive reports that certain potential stars are worth a second look. If, however, they act on this information, other clubs will be alerted to their interest and may start targeting players they've scouted.

Career Mode has also gone to some lengths to reflect the absolutely insane amounts of furore that accompany the closure of transfer windows.

"Transfer deadline day is now a very big deal," says Rutter. "We've increased the fidelity and kind of timing involved in that, so now you have eight advances in there rather than just the one. You can have multiple backwards and forwards between the clubs and players. We're tracking all the information about who's being sold and to whom, so the player has a dynamic report telling them who's in and who's out."

Another new financial feature in Career Mode is the ability to blur the lines between the wage and transfer budgets. In previous years, the two were completely separate. This year, however, players will be able to behave exactly as a real football club would by using part of their wage budget to pay a transfer fee for incoming players.

Between the new on-pitch action and the tweaks and tucks to the online and Career modes, FIFA 12 is looking very respectable. To call it a complete overhaul at this stage would be stretching it, and it's clear that it'll probably need some fine tuning before its release date. But like fashion and like Facebook, it continues to be refined and improved and, while it doesn't diminish what has gone before it, it feels impossible to go back to the earlier iterations. Just watch out for those flying players this autumn...