With domestic leagues across Europe moving into the final furlong, it’s the time of year when football fans contemplate their star performers, and in the world of FIFA 22 Ultimate Team, that can only mean one thing: Team Of The Season.
Yes, the wildest promo of the FUT cycle is just weeks away. Last year’s Team Of The Season began in late April and ran until early June, and previous campaigns have followed a similar pattern. TOTS begins with the “Community” squad, voted by fans, followed by squads of high-rated players from major and minor leagues around the world, culminating in Ultimate TOTS at the tail end. Red-pick versions of these players replace Team Of The Week players in FUT Champions rewards during the promo, and every squad is accompanied by a Squad-Building Challenge to unlock a guaranteed TOTS player from that league. These aren’t everyday promo players, either: the majority are juiced to 90+ ratings, and may even receive small weak foot and skill move upgrades.
There will be other promos beyond TOTS — last year we had Path To Glory to accompany the European Championship — but psychologically, in the Ultimate Team climb, Team Of The Season is the zenith. That means you have anything from a few days to a few weeks to think about preparing your club for an influx of endgame cards, many of whom will be accessible to even the most casual FUT player. If you want the very best, of course, you will have to pay, either on the transfer market or by putting expensive fodder into guaranteed TOTS player SBCs. Whatever your situation, you will need FUT coins. Here are some handy ways to stack them up before Team Of The Season begins.
Team Of The Week investments
One of the more reliable opportunities to make coins in the run-up to Team Of The Season will be buying and flipping Team Of The Week (in-form) players based on SBC demand. TOTW players were pretty worthless at the start of the FUT cycle, but they have become a more volatile commodity as the months have carried on, and this can work in your favour.
What you are looking for is periods when there are no highly desirable SBCs available, and/or there is a strong supply of cards from packs being opened. During these time windows, TOTW players (usually from the most recent one or two TOTW squads) rated 81 and below will drop down quite close to their discard price. That will mean they are available for 10-12k. TOTW players rated 84 and above will also slump in price. This is when you need to grab a bunch of them and stick them on your transfer list.
When to sell the cards is simple. Just keep an eye on the new content EA releases each day at 6pm GMT. Desirable SBCs that require TOTW cards will drive the price of your investment up, peaking around 1-2 hours after content drop, at which point you can sell the cards and bank your winnings. Even after EA takes its 5 per cent transaction tax for each card sold, you should make a handsome profit if you bought enough in advance.
Last year EA released several highly sought after SBCs in the month running up to Team Of The Season, including a Kylian Mbappe Ligue 1 Player Of The Month card and a Prime Icon Moments Pack SBCs, which drove up the price of all fodder. Look for SBCs along those lines to make sure you are selling into the strongest hype.
Road To The Final cards
A little while back, EA released a bunch of Road To The Final cards associated with UEFA’s three continental tournaments: the Champions League, Europa League, and Europa Conference League. These players will receive stat boosts if their team wins their ties and progresses in their tournament, which means that a card like Kai Havertz, which began as an 89-rated card, could become 95-rated if his club Chelsea end up winning the competition. A lot of these cards are tradeable, and their prices fluctuate wildly based on team performances across the two-legged ties, pre-match hype, and of course outcomes.
Gambling on these cards can be ruinous. A shock result can send the price of a coveted card tumbling by hundreds of thousands of coins. But they can also fly up in value if a team overcomes the odds or secures a comfortable lead in their match. The trick is knowing when to buy and when to sell, because the patterns don’t always make the most sense. You would expect Havertz to have risen after his team’s victory over Lille, which took him from 89 to 90, but he didn’t. He actually lost 20 per cent of his value over the next few days, before recovering most of it again in the week that followed.
Consider this the high stakes table for Team Of The Season prep. If you have a healthy coin balance and want to see whether you can turn it into a small fortune, you could look closely at the price patterns and fixture lists and try to seize on hype and panic. Studying historical pricing data about comparable players in last year’s promotion is a good idea too — it’s all still publicly available via sites like Futbin and can be compared to the tournament schedules to look for correlation. If you do hop on the RTTF bandwagon, then good luck to you!
The rise and fall of SBC fodder
We’ve talked about Team Of The Week players already, but traditional SBC fodder — rare gold cards rated 84-91 — will also be subject to heavy fluctuations in the run-up to Team Of The Season. When TOTS itself begins, fodder prices drop precipitously due to the high volume of packs being opened, which is itself an opportunity for anyone who is willing to buy it up and hoard it until later in the promotion. But prior to TOTS, fodder should remain quite high in price, meaning that quick flips based on market fluctuations will be best for making coins.
Similar to TOTW investments, you want to identify specific cards that may be good targets for flipping. If we look at Jordan Henderson’s 86-rated card in last year’s game, for example, we can see that it rose and fell by 3-5k several times in the two months before TOTS. Each price change can be mapped to the launch of a particular SBC. For example, Henderson’s price was 28k on Thursday March 11, then EA dropped a Prime Icon Pack and a repeatable Mid/Prime Icon Pack on Monday 14, and Hendo was chilling at 33.5k the next day. Craig David would be proud. (And so you would have been, had you bought a bunch of Hendersons at 28k and flipped them at 33.5k!)
So that’s what you are looking for. Good times to buy will be during specific reward periods, like Division Rivals (Thursdays at 8am GMT) and Squad Battles (Sunday 8am GMT) when supply rises. Good times to sell will be when EA drops key SBCs. Icon packs and picks have mostly been released early in the week during FIFA 22, most frequently on Mondays, so keep an eye on daily content drops and make sure to sell when a good return is available!
FUT Birthday cards
FUT Birthday is a major promotion ahead of Team Of The Season in which a host of fan-favourite players receive five-star weak foot and/or skill move upgrades. Buying cards as investments ahead of TOTS is a risk, because they may well be superseded by TOTS players from their respective leagues. But because these cards receive unique weak foot and skill move boosts, they can remain competitive with TOTS cards, and sometimes they become more desirable due to their potential links to popular TOTS cards in the same league. Historical examples of this include the FUT Birthday Youcef Atal right-midfield card from the last FIFA, which had five-star skills and a five-star weak foot. Atal went up in price during and after TOTS, because the Ligue 1 TOTS alternatives for right midfield and right wing, Angel Di Maria and Gaetan Laborde, could not match his weak foot and skill moves.
We are writing this guide at the start of FUT Birthday, so we can’t say for certain which cards may develop a similar profile, but it makes sense to look closely at positions where there is a shortage of strong weak foot and skill move players in a specific league, per the Atal example. If FUT Birthday Jack Grealish is the only Premier League left-wing player with five-star weak foot and/or skill moves heading into TOTS, for instance, and nobody else can match those stats, he is the sort of player that might rise in value.
FIFA 22 is available on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and PC.
The post ‘FIFA 22’: How to make coins before Team Of The Season appeared first on NME.
