How To Play FIFA On Mac (inc. M1 Macs)

You need two things to play FIFA on Mac: A FIFA 21 game code for PC and Windows installed on your Mac.

It’s now even easier to play FIFA on Mac using Parallels due to the introduction of DirectX 11 support and M1 Mac compatibility in the latest versions of Parallels for Mac.

Apart from Windows, you’ll also need a FIFA 21 game code from the EA Origin store.

This is the only way to run FIFA on a Mac, M1 Mac or Macbook properly and legally.

Please beware of YouTube video tutorials and websites that claim to show you how to install or download FIFA for Mac. Not only do they not work but they often involve illegal downloads of FIFA and may also infect your Mac with adware or malware.

This tutorial on how to install FIFA on Mac is easy, safe, legal and allows you to play FIFA online against friends. We even show you how you can connect your Xbox or Playstation controller to your Mac to play FIFA.

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Once you’ve learned how to run FIFA on macOS, you’ll also be able to install other games on your Mac that are PC only such as Rocket League, Among Us, Roblox, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Sam & Max Save the World, Battlefield 4, Grand Theft Auto 5, Steam games and other games on the EA Origin store that are not available for Mac.

Note that unfortunately you can’t use NVIDIA’S GeForce Now For Mac gaming platform to play FIFA because FIFA is not available via the Steam store.

How To Play FIFA On Mac

Before you start, you’ll need to make sure you have an M1 Mac or Intel Mac that’s no more than 3-4 years old with at least 8GB of RAM and 50GB of hard drive space for FIFA 21.

FIFA 21 will not launch on your Mac unless you have at least 8GB of RAM so it’s not even worth following this tutorial and installing it if you don’t.

Older Macs with less RAM simply will not be able to handle the demands of running Windows and macOS at the same time. You’ll find that FIFA either will not launch or be virtually unplayable on your Mac due to severe lag.

To check your Mac system specs, go to the Apple logo in the top left of your Mac desktop and select About this Mac.

Next to Memory you can see exactly how much RAM you have on your Mac.

In addition, you’ll need a minimum of 16GB hard drive space to install Windows on your Mac. However, we recommend having far more than this – around at least 100GB+ to be safe.

This is because FIFA 21 requires a whopping 50GB of hard drive space so that means you’ll need at least 76GB of space to install both Windows and FIFA on your Mac.

This will very quickly eat up the hard drive space of the majority of Macs. If you don’t have space, don’t worry as you can also install Windows and FIFA on an external hard drive connected to your Mac too.

If you’ve got all this in place, you’re now ready to install the latest version of FIFA on your Mac.

• First you need to install Windows on your Mac. By far the easiest way to do this is with Parallels which makes it extremely simple and convenient to switch between macOS and Windows at any moment.

• You can also install Windows using Boot Camp although this only allows you to run your Mac in macOS or Windows at one time – you have to reboot to switch between the two.
• Whichever method you choose, the great thing is that Windows 10 is now free to install on a Mac so it won’t cost you a cent. Microsoft no longer requires users to activate it unless they want to customize the look of Windows 10.
• When you’ve done that, check that DirectX 11 is installed in Windows.
• Once Windows and DirectX are installed on your Mac, the process for installing FIFA is exactly the same as if you were using a PC. First you need to install EA Origin in Windows on your Mac. EA Origin is EA’s platform for distributing games such as FIFA, The Sims etc. Simply open Windows on your Mac and download and install EA Origin for PC. If you’ve already got an Origin ID, just login but if not, you’ll need to create a username and password to finish the setup.

• You then simply need to purchase FIFA which is available in the Origin store. When you’ve purchase FIFA, it will appear under My Games in Origin. You used to be able to buy it from Amazon too bit it’s always out of stock and seems that EA have stopped using Amazon as a distributor for FIFA.
• Finally, before you try to launch FIFA on your Mac, you need to make sure that Parallels can access your Mac’s graphics card. To do this, ensure that “Automatic graphics switching” is activated in the Virtual Machine Configuration Window under Hardware > Graphics > Advanced Settings. It should be noted however that it’s macOS rather than Parallels that decides whether you can switch or not when playing games.

And that’s it, you’re now ready to launch and play FIFA 21 on your Mac!

Once Origin has downloaded and installed FIFA, you can play it on your Mac just as if you were playing on a PC, including online against friends.

You will also get updates to teams and squads throughout the season just as if you were playing FIFA on PC.

Connecting An Xbox Or Playstation Controller To FIFA On Mac

The great thing about Parallels 15 is that it now recognizes Xbox and Playstation controllers connected to your Mac via Bluetooth. This is very simple to setup as you can see below.

If you’ve installed Windows using Boot Camp, it’s slightly more complicated and you’ll need a third party app to handle external controllers.

Joystick Mapper allows you to connect external controllers and even allows you to use Playstation gamepads to play FIFA.

There is a trick you can use to make your Playstation controller trigger the FIFA PC keyboard controls on Mac using Joystick Mapper.

Why Hasn’t EA Released FIFA For Mac?

The last time EA released FIFA on Mac was back in 2011 when they released FIFA 12. FIFA 13 was released the following year but since then, EA hasn’t released any newer versions for Mac and it seems they have no intention of doing so.

It may have something to do with the fact that EA simply don’t want to invest the resources into developing a version of FIFA for Mac which is comparable with the PC and console version.

Very little effort was put into FIFA 12 and FIFA 13 and they were basically poorly ported PC versions that were full of bugs, poor graphics and you couldn’t even play online or update teams.

But don’t worry – if you follow these instructions, you can install the PC version of FIFA on your Mac (and it also works as far back as FIFA 14 on Mac if you can find a copy of it somewhere!).

If you have any problems or issues installing FIFA on your Mac using this tutorial, or you have any questions or suggestions, let us know below.