Have you ever wondered how every opponent you seem to face in the depths of Division 7 in FUT Rivals seems to have 92 Mbappe? How did they grind out so many high-rated squads to afford the best player in the game – that is, until EA released 93 Mbappe – and still languish in the lower leagues with you and your Andy Carroll evolution?
The answer is money. Real, hard cash. Put simply, if you spend your pounds, dollars, or rupees on the game’s fake currency, FUT Points, you can open expensive loot boxes in the store that grant you some guarantees of getting decent players. Either you can put these fancy players into SBCs to get Mbappe & co., or you can sell them to other players for coins, a non-purchasable currency. These players float on an in-game stock exchange, with prices dictated by how much players are worth. 91 Mbappe, his Gold card, goes for 1.6 million coins at the time of writing. Andy Carroll goes for 350.
Some players spend more money than others. On the lowest end of the scale are those who buy the game and don’t spend a penny more. Some of these are casual players, others grind their hearts out on ‘Road to Glory’ accounts, proudly displaying their lack of IRL investment. Other players, like myself, land somewhere in the middle, dropping 20 quid on a big pack when Team of the Year rolls around.
At the top end of the scale are the whales. These are the people who spend hundreds, if not thousands, on the game to play with the very best players. Your favourite streamer probably falls into this category, Liverpool star Diogo Jota almost undoubtedly does, as do the players who you come across with full Icon teams in October.
One such whale let us in on his Ultimate Team. Interviewed by the, this player revealed that they had spent $10,000 on the game since its release in September, and has the team to show for it.
The squad is worth 50 million coins, and only one player – Ronaldinho, no less – is first owned, meaning pulled directly from a pack, with every other player in the first 11 being bought from the transfer market. We’re talking Ronaldo (Nazário), Cruyff, Gullit, Maldini, Van der Sar. The only non-Icons to make the team are meta staple Ferland Mendy, and Barcelona Femení’s Caroline Hansen. The bench is no less stacked, with Mbappe and Zinedine Zidane not even making the first team.
The anonymous player believes they’ve opened around 500 packs in the three months since the game released, advising others to plump for the special packs in the store rather than wasting their points on regular packs – “I feel like the higher ticket packs give out more,” they say.
While they have had some luck with the likes of tradeable Thunderstruck Ronaldinho and Trailblazers Mbappe (the latter of whom has presumably been sold), they attribute most of their coin earnings to opening lots of packs in the early stages of the game and selling rare gold players. Lionel Messi is one such example, who sold for around 250,000 coins in the game’s earliest days and now sits at 50,000. Opening packs earlier in the year gives you more coins to work with for the rest of the season.
Loot boxes are a form of gambling, so please only spend what you can afford.
This player was also aided by EA’s mistake, when it released Johann Cruyff with the wrong PlayStyle+, and refunded all players who had bought him from the transfer market the full amount. This netted players a cool six million coins for doing precisely nothing.
However, there’s one final tidbit that will undoubtedly fuel myriad conspiracy theories, as this $10,000 player believes that the more cash you drop in a short space of time, the better players you will pull.
“It’s kind of obvious that the more you spend, the higher the likelihood that you’ll pack a good player,” they explain. “But, I feel like I get my best players when I’ve spent a lot of money in a short space of time.”
Obviously this is anecdotal evidence, and could simply be the result of confirmation bias wherein you remember the great players but not the mediocre ones.
There is also a lot of abuse that comes with such a team. The player shared images of messages sent to them, including some that are funny (dozens of credit card emojis) and others that are plain rude.
This player has spent around half or a third of what they did on the last FIFA game, but believe they already have a better team to show for it. Is that just pack luck and RNG, or better odds in EA FC? There certainly seem to be more big-money packs in the store whenever I go to check my preview packs, so maybe that’s a factor. And while this player states they have a lot of fun with their god squad, they don’t exactly recommend their spending spree for everyone.
“I can afford to spend this amount of money and I spent a lot of time on the game,” they say. “But I wouldn’t recommend others to do the same unless you enjoy it as much as I do.”
Next:EA Sports FC Ultimate Team Is Heading Towards Its First 100-Rated Player
