Exhibition and Trial Match: Best Offline Settings and Difficulty

Exhibition is the part of eFootball that works with no internet at all, and it is the same mode older players will remember as the friendly match in PES. Some versions of the game label the offline entry Trial Match. Different name on the button, same idea: pick two real teams, set your conditions, and play the computer. Konami describes it as the casual offline experience, and casual is the right word. Nothing you do here touches your Dream Team or your ranking. It is football with the pressure turned off, and with the right settings it is genuinely good football.

What Exhibition actually gives you

You get the game's licensed club and national squads with their real players, the proper kits, and the full match engine. What you do not get is your own built squad, because Dream Team lives online. For a lot of players that trade is fine. Exhibition with real teams is how you learn a new formation, test a club you might support next season, or settle the oldest argument in football with a friend on the same couch. On console, a second controller turns it into local multiplayer with no connection at all.

Difficulty: the setting that decides everything

Six levels run from Beginner to Legend, and picking the right one matters more than any other choice. Start lower than your pride wants. If you are new to eFootball or coming back after a long break, begin on Regular. The computer will pass it around and punish real mistakes, but you will get time on the ball to learn the controls. Move to Professional when you win two matches in a row at Regular. Superstar and Legend are for when Professional feels slow, and they are meant to feel unfair at first. The AI presses harder, finishes better and reads your favourite moves. A good rule: the right difficulty is the one where you win some, lose some, and every goal against you teaches you something specific.

Match length and conditions

Five-minute matches are a sprint where one mistake decides everything. Ten minutes is the sweet spot for most players: long enough to build attacks, short enough to fit a break. Fifteen minutes gives you the full rhythm of a real game, with spells of pressure and quiet patches, and it is the best length for practising patience. Turn injuries and fatigue on if you want the game to feel honest, off if you are drilling a specific skill. For set pieces, skip matches entirely and use training mode, where you can take the same free kick thirty times in a row. Our homepage guide explains where training sits in the menus if you have never opened it.

Making the computer a better opponent

The AI plays to the team you give it, so choose your opponent with intent. Play a possession team when you want to practise pressing. Play a counter-attacking side when your defending needs work. If every match feels the same, the problem is usually that you keep picking the same two clubs. Rotate leagues and continents and the game changes character under your hands. You can also hand the AI a weaker team at a higher difficulty, which produces a sharp, organised underdog, a very different test from a lazy giant.

Exhibition vs Trial Match naming

Players get confused because Konami has used both labels across updates and platforms. If your menu says Trial Match where this guide says Exhibition, you are in the right place. The giveaway is the content: real clubs and national teams, computer opponent, no connection required, nothing saved to your online account. Names change with updates. That list of traits does not.

What carries over, and what does not

Be clear-eyed about this part. Goals, wins and brilliant performances in Exhibition stay in Exhibition. They do not earn Dream Team players, points or league progress, because all of that sits on Konami's servers. What does carry over is you. Your defending habits, your timing on through balls, your calm in front of goal: those travel with you into every online match you play later. That is why serious players still spend time here, and why our post on setting up offline play on mobile treats this mode as the main event rather than a backup plan.

Set it up once: Regular or Professional, ten minutes, a team you do not normally use. Then raise the difficulty only when the game tells you to, by getting too easy. Played that way, the offline mode is not a stripped-down demo. It is the practice ground and the pressure-free match rolled into one, available anywhere, at any time, with the connection off.