Faded take, but Madden 25 should take a page out of the OG Madden Mobiles.

Have some kind of high rated season champion that requires you to win X h2h games, win X solo battles, complete X challenges, finish 20 days of daily OBJs, etc. and then you can put those token into a 87-90 rated player for S1, and they scale with each season. Makes the game grindable, you don't have to spend money and its literally 1 player, so EA aren't losing out on any money. 

I feel like theres some easy fixes to make this game very engaging :/

Or hell 5 different lower rated S1 'hero's' and they're obtained by various methods, and you can put them into a S1 champion set and you get all those players back.