The obvious next step with football/soccer games is to combine a management and a Fifa type game into one. The management in Fifa is really crappy compared to that of a Championship Manager. Their needs to be more options to assign to players apart from just marking players. Scouting needs to be improved with more filters, buying and selling players needs to be improved, finding players etc, signing players like i can sign non-EU national when playing in the EPL and yet in real life they would need to get a work permit/half the players wouldn't be able to come to my team. There are tons of other things i find annoying as well.
It doesn't matter what's wrong with Fifa in terms of the management, all that would be fixed by combining it with a management game, like how you can play FM games in Fifa except have it in one game.
And for all those people who are bitching about just wanting to play the game and not worry about management, finances etc, why not just improve/change the tournament mode to almost mimic the manager mode, so you can keep playing forever, promotion/relegation, new random/'youth' players added every year or 2 so the game doesn't run out of players etc
Also please fix the problem where if you do a long ball over the defence the keeper sometimes doesn't come out to get it when they would reach it long b4 the striker does (only an AI prob, obviously we can make our keepers come out).
That brings me to another point, we need to have more control over the keepers, or possibly the ability to put in manual keeping or aytomatic, so that you can select the keeper and move him left/right and press a button to save the ball etc. In 07 it's not bad except you have to press the keeper charge button and then try and move him. It would be easier if say when a shot came in you hold left and the keeper moves left and then press a button as well to make him save it. I thought the keepers in 07 were pretty crappy, but then i figured out how to use the keeper and mine has made some stunning saves since, although the AI keepers don't appear to be that great. By giving the chance to manually control the keeper it would be very useful in player V player games as the better players can manage to save some their opponents shot which in automatic keeper they wouldn't have been able to. Also makes the chances of a keeper error more realistic, if you accidently press the other way or think they are shooting one way and get wrongfooted etc