I don't think EA will go Free2Play. There is no reason for it if you compare it to efootball which didn't have much choice.
Have you not seen their financial figures?
They've just announced FIFA 22 made $267m in game sales (physical and digital) compared to ~$1.5bn in microtransactions after the fact.
If you get rid of the customer's cost of entry (i.e. having to pay for the game, and it's prohibitively expensive until 8 months after its release)... Suddenly your potential audience is even bigger. A hell of a lot of people will pay for card packs etc. when they've got the game for free, because they're not having to pay for anything else.
I would bet they would
more than make up the missing $267m from the volume of people who would join their ecosystem and put $10 in. Let alone the percentage of those who will find themselves putting $100 in before they know it, because the game is designed to get you addicted if you're in any way succeptible.
Producing an online-only F2P game with one focus (FUT) would mean a lot of costs removed, too (publishing costs, even staff costs - they could fire everyone who makes all the offline modes, because why wouldn't you, when those modes make a fraction of what FUT makes).
I'd bet money on EA FC being F2P... and here's something else.
FIFA 22 has just gone cross-platform. I bet it'll be cross-platform, too. Just like eFootball, and with the same drawbacks. We are witnessing the end of an era.
Hopefully, offline modes will be paid DLC or something, just like eFootball's Master League will be, and that the DLC will need paying for yearly (in order to keep its development moving, so we're not stuck with the same features for eternity). But even then, the danger is that it's just a dreadful game, designed for FUT, and nobody buys any offline DLC. At which point, it dies forever, and offline players like me have to play FIFA 16 for the rest of our lives.