Madden 23‘s Franchise mode is, for many players, the marquee mode to play every single year, and a Connected Franchise (CFM) can be even more exciting, letting you join a league with up to 31 other players and create your own NFL universe of star rookies, burgeoning dynasties, and heated rivalries. But a particularly annoying and sadly widespread bug is causing issues for Connected Franchise players right now. Oftentimes, final scores aren’t saving, and in some cases, the league is even traveling back in time, like moving from the middle of the regular season to suddenly the middle of the preceding NFL Draft.
Suffice it to say this is incredibly frustrating for CFM players, as stats, scores, and other milestones can all be wiped away in an instant due to what seems to be a cloud syncing issue. We’ve reached out to EA for comment–and hopefully guidance–on how to navigate this issue until a patch resolves it, but in the meantime, one prominent CFM league believes it may have found a temporary solution to the game’s Franchise glitch, at least in cases when a game’s final score and stats don’t seem to have been saved.
Madden 23 Connected Franchise bug fix – First method
For starters, we’ll explain what this bug looks like in-game. Imagine you’ve just finished a game against an opponent in Week 3 of the regular season. When you get back to the Franchise menu, you should see things like the box score and new upgrades for players. Instead, many players are all too commonly finding that their just-played game is sitting there in the menu waiting to be played as though it never has been.
This can drive Madden players up the wall, as it demands either the league’s commissioner forces a win for the rightful team at the cost of actual recorded stats and injuries, or the two teams must replay the game. Many leagues, including my own, have been desperately seeking a fix for this, and the Madden Loyalty League (MLL) may actually have one, at least in cases when the final score isn’t showing up in the post-game menu before players get back to the main menu.
According to the MLL, players can restore their saved data using a few short steps post-game:
- If no final score is appearing in the post-game menu, both players should open the score summary.
- This should restore the final score and cause it to appear where it was once missing–you can see before and after shots in the image below.
- Continue to the CFM main menu and check the status of your game. It should now be saved.
It should be noted that both the MLL and commenters on Twitter have suggested that this fix is not guaranteed to work, so your mileage may vary, unfortunately. Still, it’s worth a try as it only takes a moment. If it still doesn’t work, keep reading.
Madden 23 Connected Franchise bug fix – Alternate method
If the above method doesn’t work in your case, I personally stumbled upon what might be an alternate fix just recently. After my Week 3 game ended, I returned to the CFM main menu to find none of it saved and the game was suggesting I prepare to play the Ravens, the team I had just defeated in a close battle. It was my first time experiencing this bug and I felt absolutely dejected.
Not knowing what to do, I turned off my Xbox and started to move on with my day, but within about two minutes, I turned the game back on using Xbox’s Quick Resume feature, simply to seek further understanding of what went wrong. The game needed to reconnect to EA’s servers, so I prompted it to do so, and once it had, the game history was suddenly present.
With that in mind, I invite you to try this same method if you find yourself in the CFM menu needing to replay a game:
- Without closing Madden 23, turn your console off by putting it into Standby (PS5) or Instant-On (Xbox) mode. This should disconnect the game from the servers.
- Turn your console back on and reconnect to EA servers within Madden 23.
- Check the status of your game.
Like the above method, this has not proven 100% reliable in my league, so Madden players are sadly without a completely reliable fix for now. But knowing and using these two methods should help salvage some games in your league, even if others are less fortunate.
In the meantime, we’re hoping to hear back from EA soon regarding why this is plaguing the game mode, what figurative band-aids players might be able to apply in the meantime, and when to expect an official patch.
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