When a Football Game Outran Vice City’s Shadow

Nobody expected a yearly football game to shove Grand Theft Auto VI off the top of PlayStation’s charts.

Yet that is exactly what happened in late July 2026, weeks after Rockstar’s most anticipated sequel had already planted itself at number one in almost every regional PlayStation Store on Earth.
EA FC 27 vs. GTA VI
GTA VI pre-orders went live on 25 June. Within days the $99.99 Ultimate Edition sat first from the United States to Japan, from India to the United Kingdom. The cheaper $79.99 standard copy trailed behind it. Charts on PlayStation are driven by revenue, not raw units, so the premium SKU did the heavy lifting. Rockstar still had not shown full gameplay. Launch remained locked for 19 November. None of that mattered. The brand was enough.

Then EA opened the gates for EA Sports FC 27.

The first trailer landed in late July. Pre-orders followed on 23 July. EA did not stop at the usual two-tier model. It invented a third: Ultimate Plus, priced at $149.99 in the US and €159.99 in much of Europe. The window was short. Buyers had until 31 August. After that the edition vanished. Early access began 18 September. The full game arrived 25 September.

The package was built for Football Ultimate Team addicts. Five seasons of Premium Passes. Up to 10,000 FC Points dripped across five months. An 85+ International ICON. A Hall of FUT pick that included Adebayo Akinfenwa, Giovani dos Santos, Loïc Rémy, Marouane Fellaini and Eljero Elia. Extra evolution slots. Career Mode staff and scouts. Cosmetics in The Grounds. A competitive head start measured in days, not hours.
Screenshots spread fast. FUT Police Leaks posted store rankings from the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark and Norway. In those countries the $150 football edition sat above GTA VI. People were not just buying football. They were buying the most expensive football.

What makes the moment feel almost comic is that the game doing the overtaking is not some once-in-a-generation open-world event but an annual football sim whose premium SKU costs fifty dollars more than Rockstar’s top-tier edition, packs five seasons of Premium Passes, ten thousand FC Points dripped out over months, a Hall of FUT pick starring names like Akinfenwa and Fellaini, seven days of early access from 18 September, and a hard cutoff date of 31 August that turned the whole thing into a FOMO machine, so European FUT grinders who treat Ultimate Team like a second job simply opened their wallets first while GTA VI, still months from its 19 November launch and still withholding proper gameplay, sat there looking expensive and mysterious rather than immediately useful.
America told a slightly different story. On the US PlayStation Store, NBA 2K27’s $150 Ultra Edition often sat above both. FC 27 Ultimate Plus landed around third. The pattern was the same. Sports publishers had discovered that a loud, limited, currency-stuffed edition could beat a cultural event on a revenue chart. Standard copies of both sports games sat much lower. Whales were carrying the list.

Critics called it greed. Charts called it demand. The same players who complain about Ultimate Team still pre-order the version that feeds Ultimate Team. That is not a contradiction. That is the business.

GTA VI remains the larger story. Newzoo called its first week of pre-orders the strongest campaign on record and floated first-week launch revenue in the billions. PlayStation’s install base dwarfs Xbox. Affiliate snapshots suggested a wide PS5 lead. Microsoft answered that Xbox was seeing record orders of its own and told people to wait for real data. Both things can be true. A giant can still lose a weekly store ranking to a $150 football pack. For Microsoft Store game purchases, see our Xbox game refund guide; PlayStation purchases follow a separate refund process.

The lesson is not that football killed GTA. The lesson is how store charts now work. A digital list ranked by money rewards the edition that extracts the most from the fewest buyers. EA designed Ultimate Plus for that list. Rockstar designed Ultimate Edition for a different kind of hunger: the hunger to own the next Vice City before anyone else.

By early September the calendar had already moved. Ultimate Plus was no longer on sale. FC 27 early access was days away. GTA VI still sat months out, still number one in many best-seller views, still waiting for the world to see Lucia and Jason at full speed.

One chart snapshot does not decide a generation. It does reveal who pays first, and why. In the summer of 2026, a surprising number of PlayStation owners decided that a loaded football start mattered more than a legend they could not play until November.