EA Sports doesn’t usually bombard us with player SBCs-last year’s highlight was Flashback Franck Ribery-but there are puzzle SBCs for small packs, plus the popular upgrade SBCs, where you can submit gold cards with low chemistry in return for packs that guarantee players from the specific major leagues. Something we can say with a lot more certainty is that TOTY will be flush with SBCs. But if you only have a couple of tradeable marquee players like Mbappe or an Icon or two that you like, you might prefer to hang onto them. The worst-case scenario is that you can buy them back for a similar price in a few weeks, and you likely have a ton of untradeable cards you can play with in the meantime. If you have all your coins tied up in popular meta special cards like Winter Wildcards Guendouzi, in-form Vinicius Junior and Hakimi, and cards of that nature, then it may be wise to get rid of them and wait to see what happens. So the question of whether to liquidate the club for TOTY in FIFA 22 is a little more nuanced than usual. Naturally, this kind of approach insulates a club against too much loss of either quality or coinage when the market fluctuates. It also appears that more FUT players than ever are focusing on untradeable cards for their clubs, through SBCs and Objectives, and saving coins for a few marquee players. (Base cards cannot be packed while special versions of that card are available, limiting supply.) The only Rare Gold card still worth over 1m coins at the time of writing is Kylian Mbappe, whose card is potentially more resistant to market forces anyway due to its outsized performance in-game and the prospect of Mbappe featuring in Team of the Year itself, ensuring its scarcity during the promotion. However, the FIFA 22 transfer market is behaving a little differently, with traditional candidates for big losses like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi already lower than they have historically been at this stage of the cycle. As a result, the crash itself tends to happen earlier and earlier. This phenomenon has become self-fulfilling to some extent, as the FUT player base sells off teams in order to avoid losing value in a market crash, precipitating one in the process. In previous years, Team of the Year has often been accompanied by a transfer market crash that has seen the price of popular high-end cards plummet. Whatever your approach, you will want to prep your club before the festivities begin, which is usually in mid-to-late January. That may be true, but TOTY is such a festival of hype and surrounding in-game content that there are usually lots of ways to get involved, whether by opening saved packs and grinding the ever-popular “upgrade SBCs” (Squad-Building Challenges), or by taking advantage of market fluctuations to build up your FUT coins. So what, you may ask? The average fan will never pack one without spending a fortune on FIFA Points.
But unlike the average promo team, there are no duds, and every card is considerably more powerful and well-rounded than your everyday special player. It has a simple premise: EA Sports puts out a squad of the 11 best footballers of the previous calendar year, based on a mixture of voting and the developer’s own editorial discretion.
Since its launch a few years ago, Team of the Year has become the most anticipated and arguably most exciting ‘promo’ on the Ultimate Team calendar, and FIFA 22‘s is shaping up to be no exception.