Private equity is coming for your football and your football video game.
Reviewing Madden NFL 27 on Switch 2 is weird. For one, this is the first time since the Wii that Madden has come out on a Nintendo system in consecutive years. It’s also the second time around for the game to hit a new console. The novelty factor has worn off. I’m still interested in seeing how Madden is on Switch 2 in year two though, especially since the Franchise mode received a lot of attention this year, highlighted by a “Persona Engine” that promised to add a lot more variety and nuance to the proceedings. Franchise is a mode near and dear to my heart. I have spent days of my life taking real or fantastical teams on multi-year journeys since the days of the Nintendo 64. I’ve taken teams decades into the future where essentially the entire league is filled with made-up players. One time Madden generated a guy named “Orlando Orlando,” who became a superstar cornerback. However, there is one modern aspect of sports that Franchise mode in Madden has never been able to fully replicate, and now that is something also impacting EA Sports. That all has to do with the new ownership group at EA, which combines the marvels of private equity and foreign governments.
The NFL recently started allowing private equity firms to be able to buy into NFL ownership groups. This allows the 31 NFL owners (not the Green Bay Packers because of their ownership structure where the town sort of owns the team; a subject for a different day) to have a new avenue for revenue generation, as they can sell off parts of their team to private equity as a way to inject millions and billions of dollars into the team. This all helps the owners take further steps to make their end game not be about success on the gridiron, but instead success in asking for public money from local municipalities and using that to build gigantic entertainment complexes that they can own and earn substantial revenue on. Like the sorts of entertainment complexes that would feature musicians like Ed Sheeran or Macklemore, just to name a random pair of artists. If Madden were to make Franchise a full representation of the NFL, this would be an important aspect to include. And it might only be a matter of time before the NFL starts allowing international teams or foreign entities to buy pieces of a franchise. And that’s something that ties into Electronic Arts.
Right before this year’s iteration of Madden launched, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and a pair of American firms (private equity group Silver Lake and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners) completed the largest leveraged buyout in history to purchase Electronic Arts. For $55 billion, that trio turned EA from a public company to a private one, and they also saddled EA with a lot of debt that will almost assuredly lead to further layoffs and game cancellations at the company. A leveraged buyout is when two levers are used in combination to fund an acquisition. The majority of the funding for this type of buyout comes from borrowed money and the rest comes from private equity.
In the case of EA, the company has assumed $18 billion of debt (plus interest). That is not a great place to be in. Reporting from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier notes that when the buyout closed, EA noted it would cut $700 million in annual costs as a way to assuage their debtors. There will be layoffs. There will be changes. In the weeks after EA was sold, word also came out that the company might be merged with another PIV-owned company (Savvy Games – publishers of that Monopoly mobile game and the current owners of your map data and images from Pokémon Go).
I could go on further about the ways in which this could suck and end poorly. I’ve noticed that when all this went down, people outside of the very online video game space didn’t really know about this sale and what it means. This is my way of trying to elucidate what this messy situation is. It’s confusing. It’s depressing. It’s weirdly representative of the state of video games as a business in 2026.
At some point I should touch on the game itself. Madden NFL 27 on Switch 2 is a sophomore slump in its return to Nintendo platforms, but more so because of the choices across every version of the game and not just the Switch 2 version. The Switch 2 version runs a little bit better this year, pushing 60 frames per second instead of sitting at 30 like last year. The feature parity is there. Ultimate Team is present if you want to do that. The Superstar mode adds “boss battles” for some reason, but doesn’t feel majorly different than last year’s version. It’s still fun to be a super fast QB and just run for 150 yards every game.
Franchise mode had a huge facelift, but in most ways it’s a busted mess. The first few times you go through the new contract negotiation mini-game are novel, but once you start doing that for a bunch of undrafted free agents, it starts to wear thin. You can now only resign or negotiate with players at largely random parts of the season, which does add a tiny layer of strategy. That whisper of strategy goes away when you cut a player and then two weeks later, the game prompts you to negotiate with them. I had my issues with how Franchise was structured for the last decade, but this huge shift misses more often than it hits.
The economy also seems to get busted in Franchises over a stretch of time. I keep seeing computer-controlled teams triple-up on players at the same position. The offseason free agency seems bugged in a way that you will never ever sign the highest-rated free agent. Players retire without warning at young ages and inopportune times. I’ve signed a player to a 4-year extension only to see them retire before the age of 30 moments later. In spite of all this incalculable jank, I’m still enjoying myself. Enjoyment is there if you like messing around with broken systems and taking advantage of sometimes comical exploits.
The basic gameplay isn’t dramatically different year-over-year. I thought I’d get more out of the new catch mechanics and some of the defensive tweaks, but over a longer period of gameplay, the catch mechanics are inconsistent at best and the defensive tweaks stop being that engaging. I ran into roughly the same amount of funny glitches as last year. Nothing ruined games, though some ruined plays. In the moment-to-moment gameplay on the field, the fun and quality outweighs the quirky nonsense.
This year’s version of Madden on Switch 2 was not made under the new regime at Electronic Arts, but with the promise of expense cuts and the pile of debt the company owes, I worry for what happens to this brand of football video game in the future. I have my issues with the changes to Franchise mode, but this is the first year of this huge overhaul. There is a foundation to build on in that mode for the future with refinement, but with the very way the company is structured, they’ll only be able to make that improved version of the game if it pays off the debt. The game is rough but still fun. In sports terms, it feels like the 2025 Carolina Panthers. It might still make the playoffs with a losing record. The future, however, feels more like the 2026 Cleveland Browns quarterback room. Electronic Arts will be paying off their own version of Deshaun Watson’s albatross of a contract for years to come, if they survive.
