What are the best PS5 football games? The top soccer games let us play out our dreams of becoming a pro player or manager. Harnessing the power of the PS5, the best PS5 football games now look like the real thing, too. If you can’t make it to your club’s stadium at 3pm on a Saturday, settling into a PlayStation session is the next best thing.
Our collection of the best football games on PS5 includes hyper-realism, arcade action, detailed management and…multicoloured bean footballers. Yes, we write about the best games of all time – why do you ask?
The best PS5 football games are:
- FIFA 23
- eFootball 2023
- Rocket League
- Football Manager 2023
- FIFA 22
- Fall Guys
1. FIFA 23
FIFA 23 is the daddy of football games, and if you only buy one football game for PS5, it’ll probably be made by EA SPORTS. Fans know what to expect by now with FIFA; realistic match play, licensed graphics with the biggest clubs and stadiums in the world, and familiar commentary from Derek Rae.
There are game modes for everyone, including Career Mode, Pro Clubs, freestyle VOLTA FOOTBALL, and of course FIFA Ultimate Team. FUT gets deeper by the year and has more content to grind and cards to collect. EA has introduced crossplay for the first time so you don’t need to worry if your friend is playing on Xbox Series X|S.
FIFA 23 is best experienced on PS5; its beefier processing introduces HyperMotion2 motion capture, bringing a ton of animations from a real football match into the game. On the DualSense controller, you’ll even get the sound of the ball hitting the post coming through the inbuilt speaker (it made us jump and we switched it off immediately).
Enjoy FIFA before it rebrands to EA SPORTS FC this autumn, after a dispute with global football organisation FIFA over naming rights.
2. eFootball 2023
Konami has revived Pro Evolution Soccer as eFootball 23. Back in the PS2/PS3 era, you were either a FIFA player or a Pro Evolution player. It was tribal, and hardcore fans of the Konami title said that PES was a better representation of football in real life.
After a shaky start, eFootball 23 has potential: the gameplay purists might even enjoy it over FIFA. 600,000 downloads across console, PC and mobile mean it must be doing something right. However, if you want to hark back to the days of Master League, or any single-player action, you’re out of luck. Content centres around MyClub, which is Konami’s answer to FUT, and it can sometimes feel like a mobile game until you get into a match.
For a free-to-play game, eFootball is worth a shot on PS5. If some of the money MyClub makes Konami in microtransactions can be invested in new game modes, this game could rival FIFA once more.
3. Rocket League
If you think football games could be improved by rocket-powered go-karts, bright colours and loud EDM, you’ll be right at home with Rocket League. The premise of the beautiful game remains, but you’ll be kicking the ball in your juiced-up car that can skid, flip and even drive up walls. Games are short and sweet at 5 minutes plus overtime, which makes Rocket a better pick-up-and-play football game than some of the deeper, more tactical games on this list.
Rocket League has been out since 2015, has bagged hundreds of awards and is now free to play. It’s got a massive cross-platform player base if you want to take to the global competitive stage, or you can chill vs the CPU in single-player matchups.
Whilst it looks nothing like Manchester City vs Liverpool, Rocket League is still one of the best football games on PS5.
4. Football Manager 2023
Football Manager 2023 – delayed on PS5 at release until February – is back on consoles, and brings the joy of tactics, spreadsheets and transfers to your TV. It’s the first FM game on a PlayStation since the heady days of FM Handheld 2014 on the PS Vita.
Unless you’re a football fan living under a rock, you’ll know the deal with this legendary management simulation. You become the overseer of your favourite football club on the quest for glory. Choose your club, or start unemployed and look for your new favourite team. You’ll need to keep your squad happy and scoring, scout the next best players and, ultimately, win the quadruple. If things are going well, the board might give you some more transfer budget, but if things are going badly, you could be up for the chop.
The console version is slimmed down in comparison to the PC, but that means you can blast through seasons at a better pace. Be warned: FM is highly addictive. We’ve lost countless hours to the series throughout the years, as the ‘one more game’ itch is strong.
5. FIFA 22
FIFA 22 was still a quality game, and there’s still lots of enjoyment to be had from last year’s game. If you’re not fussed about finding an instant matchup online and just want to play Career Mode or couch co-op with friends, FIFA 22 is not worlds behind the latest edition. Sometimes, we know it’s hard to let go of a team built in a decade-long management career. Online, you’ll still be able to play, but building a squad from scratch will be difficult as the market is dead and you’ll come up against god-tier squads from players who had the game since launch.
You should be able to find old copies of FIFA at a bargain price on the secondhand market, or if you’re an EA Play member, you can download it for free now.
6. Fall Guys
It’s probably a bit of a stretch to call Fall Guys a football game but hear us out.
Fall Guys is an online competitive game show, and several of the challenges at hand bring the beautiful game into its brightly coloured bean universe. The most obvious is Fall Ball, where teams of 2-8 need to work together to score more goals than their rivals. The balls, like in Rocket League, are much bigger than your bean, and there are two in play across the 90-second matches, so attack and defence needs to be balanced to win. As beans, you’ll break the rules of football by pushing the ball rather than kicking it into the giant goals. Fall Ball has alternate modes which rotate, such as golden goal rules, where the first bean team to score wins the game.
Fall Guys is free to play on Playstation and is cross-platform so you can team up with friends on other consoles, too. Massively multiplayer, free-to-play gameshow battle royale, even if you think it isn’t a football game
So there you have the best PS5 football games. Turns out, FIFA isn’t the only place to get your footy fix on PlayStation as one of the best Football games. If you’re all balled out, why not try out some more of the best PS5 games instead?