Soccer games render some players with startling accuracy and others as generic approximations. The difference is almost never artistic ability; it is whether that athlete ever sat in front of a capture rig.
A scan is a scheduled appointment, not a download
Capturing a face means seating the person inside an array of synchronized cameras that photograph them from every angle at once. The rig is fixed, so the athlete has to travel to it.
Sessions take a short time but require the player to be available, willing and contractually cleared. Any of those three can fail independently of the other two.
Teams cooperate around preseason, when squads are together and travel is already organized. Outside that window, getting thirty athletes into one room is close to impossible.
Raw capture is only the start of the work
The rig produces a dense mesh with millions of points, far too heavy to animate in a game running at high frame rates. Artists rebuild it as a lighter model that moves correctly.
That rebuild has to preserve the features people recognize while dropping the detail nobody notices in motion. It is skilled manual work and it does not compress well.
Hair remains the hardest part, because it is not a surface and behaves differently under every lighting condition. Studios spend disproportionate effort there for exactly that reason.
Squads change faster than the pipeline runs
A season's roster is not final when production begins, and players move between clubs after the game has been finished. Some faces are therefore built for a shirt the athlete no longer wears.
Updates arrive later through downloadable content, but each one has to pass the same modeling and approval steps. The queue is finite and the newest signing is not always at its front.
American leagues complicate this further, because roster churn and draft entries add unfamiliar names every year who have never been near a capture rig.
Rights sit on top of everything
Using someone's likeness requires permission, usually negotiated through a players' association rather than individually. The agreement determines who can be depicted and how.
Where a league or union has not licensed likeness rights, the game must ship a placeholder even if a perfectly good scan exists somewhere. Legal availability and technical availability are separate.
This is why a game can look photographic in one competition and generic in the next. The gap reflects paperwork more than production budget.
Why studios still invest so heavily
Recognition drives attachment. A player who looks right anchors everything else the simulation claims about them, and a wrong face undermines accurate statistics sitting alongside it.
Scanned faces also feed marketing, broadcast-style presentation and companion apps, so one capture session pays for itself across several products. The cost is shared rather than isolated.
The bottleneck is therefore access to people, not to technology. Any studio can build the rig; only some can get the athletes to sit in it.