EA FC 25 Ultimate Team: how to get started without real money

Ultimate Team was introduced in 2009, and I made my debut in 2011. But because I didn’t know that you start from scratch every year, I didn’t feel like rebuilding my hard-earned team the next.

It wasn’t until FIFA 2019 that I ventured back into Ultimate Team mode and was promptly overwhelmed by the leap in complexity and countless new possibilities. And yet, at the same time, I was captivated.

If you’re new to Ultimate Team, I’ll explain everything you need to know and give you tips to get started on the right foot. Old hands are welcome to share their knowledge and tips in the comments.

A few points before kick-off

Yes, Ultimate Team does have its downsides. Pay-to-win accusations don’t come out of nowhere. There’s a lot of temptation to invest real money in virtual players. After all, it lets you skip several hours of play to get good cards faster.

Whether that’s fair or not is another question. Every year, people shoot their mouth off about it online, such as in this Reddit thread. And yes, developer EA even actively supports pay-to-win with its own real money store, which I think is a shame.

All the same, I love Ultimate Team.

So, let’s get stuck in.

New to Ultimate Team

At the start, you get a randomly selected team of bronze, silver and gold footballers – in other words, cards. But EA will begin by asking you which country you want most of your first Ultimate team to come from. This avoids setting out with zero team chemistry.

Your first goal is to play games in order to collect what are known as packs that contain cards, which you can receive coin rewards for. These are the most important modes:

Squad Battles (offline)

This is where you play against real teams of other gamers, but they’re controlled by the computer. The higher you set the difficulty level, the more points you get for winning. The more points you score, the higher your rank at the end of the week. The higher your rank, the better the weekly rewards you reap in the form of packs and coins.

Division Rivals (online)

This works in a similar way to Seasons mode in that you play online with your ultimate team against other players. These in turn play with their own ultimate teams. Wins and draws give you the points you need to move up in the leagues – called divisions.

Unlike in Squad Battles, you also receive minus points for defeats. However, you can’t be relegated. For instance, if you’re promoted from the fifth to fourth division, you stay there no matter how often you lose. That being said, if you lose too often between your wins, you’ll never make it to the third division, where there are even better rewards at the end of the week.

Division Rivals also acts as a minor, first hurdle for Champions. Winning in Rivals not only lets you move up to higher leagues and earn better rewards, it also gives you Champions points for the play-offs.

Champions: Play-off (online)

If you’ve collected enough Champions points, you can take part in the Champions play-offs, where you play five games. If you win three, you receive a small reward in the form of packs, coins and – more importantly – qualifying for the Champions finals. If not, you can try again, but only until the end of the week. Then there’s a reset and you have to qualify for the play-offs again via Division Rivals.

Champions: Finals (online)

If you thought you’d already worked your socks off in the play-offs, this is a whole other ball game. The finals are the Champions League of Ultimate Team. Incidentally, it used to be called the Weekend League because you can only play finals at the weekend. This makes these matches into even more of a special event. You play 15 games against the best of the best. The more points you score, the higher your rank at the end of the week. And – you guessed it – this is the only place in the game you can get your hands on the best packs and the most coins.

One thing’s for sure. If you want to get the best rewards in Ultimate Team, you have to play a lot. Ultimate Team is a time zapper. But one that’s a lot of fun. Partly because your team’s constantly changing. You’re always getting new, exciting cards that you really want to try out. There’s also the fact that no two opponents are the same. Everyone puts together their Ultimate Team as they see fit. In fact, opponents have often given me ideas with their teams that I’ve then tried to replicate myself with varying degrees of success.

However, if you play with real teams in Seasons mode, 90 per cent of your opponents will be either Real Madrid or Manchester City. And that gets boring pretty quick. Believe me, I’m speaking from experience.

From basic cards to superstars: the evolution of your Ultimate Team

Let’s get to the question I asked myself back in 2011. Why should you spend hours and hours building your team if it won’t exist next year and you’ll have to start from scratch? There’s one thing you need to know about Ultimate Team. The mode is actually one big cycle, which consists of about twelve smaller cycles within a year, also known as seasons.

In other words, the footballers in the packs at the beginning are the base versions that you can find in the rest of the game. These base versions are categorised as gold, silver or bronze, depending on their strength. More powerful forms of the same cards are only launched in the weeks that follow. You’ll be able to tell them apart by their special designs.

Some players receive special cards because of an outstanding season in real football. Man City star Haaland, for example, has just been awarded an EPL player of the month card. Meanwhile, Theo Hernandez, was named in the Team of the Week at the start of the season because he scored a goal as a full-back against Venezia FC, which is rather unusual for a defender.

Other players receive a card on special occasions or in unique circumstances. Last year, for instance, there was the Legacy season. Special cards pay tribute to former icons – the children of erstwhile stars who have followed in their footsteps. Daniel Maldini, for example, son of legendary Paolo Maldini. But you won’t find Daniel’s card in packs. Instead, you have to complete special tasks in the game to get your hands on it. More on that later.

As you can see, in Ultimate Team, new cards are constantly being launched. These either need to be unlocked or unpacked, giving you new opportunities to strengthen your current team. In other words, building your team never stops; today’s best players might not even be around tomorrow. And because the special cards and seasons are usually connected to real-life football events, Ultimate Team indirectly tells you which leagues, teams, players and talents are popular at that time.

If it weren’t for the big reset at the end of the gaming year, the ever-improving card value would get far too powerful. Over the years, you’d never be able to keep up with the best gamers, or rather those most willing to pay. That’s why it makes sense to build from scratch every year. This is the real attraction of the game. As trite as it sounds, in Ultimate Team, the journey is the destination.

Apart from matches, what else can you do?

Ultimate Team isn’t just about matches. Over the weeks and months, you’ll be unpacking and hoarding hundreds of players. You won’t be able to use most of them, as ultimately, you can only send eleven of them onto the pitch. This begs the question of what to do with the rest of them. You swap them for better ones in the Squad Building Challenges (SBC).

Think of these like mini puzzles. Using player cards, you have to put together a team that meets certain conditions, such as overall strength, team chemistry and players from certain leagues. If you solve the puzzle, the cards you used will be removed from your team, but you’ll receive cool rewards, including new special cards and even card packs filled to the brim.

Remember the Haaland EPL Player of the Month card from earlier? You only get this if you meet two corresponding SBCs, and it’s only available for a limited time.

Sometimes the SBCs are made up of rather random puzzles. In most cases, however, they’re based on the real game.

One example is the weekly Marquee Matchups SBC, a puzzle consisting of four other mini-puzzles. The focus is on the four games of the week, such as the Milan derby or Manchester City vs. Arsenal. The challenge could be to «put together a team consisting of at least five Series A players, two of whom must be Milan or Inter players, the team chemistry must be 70 with a maximum of three different leagues represented in the team.»

Each mini puzzle you solve gives you a small reward. If you manage all four, there’s a big group reward on top. In other words, lots of packs and coins. You can either use the new cards to improve your team or start new SBCs. As well as being fun, it ensures the weak cards you get rid of via SBC aren’t completely useless. In fact, some of the most powerful cards in the entire game can only be obtained via SBCs that are difficult, although never impossible.

The key takeaway is: never underestimate the SBCs.

Reaching goals – also means better rewards

The third pillar of Ultimate Team is what’s known as goals. In other words, tasks that you have to complete in matches or SBCs to unlock rewards. Tasks could be something like: «score three long range goals with an Italian player». Or: «play five games in Squad Battles, Rivals or Champions and put six Spanish players in your starting eleven.»

Some tasks reward you with packs, coins and footballers. Remember the Haaland EPL Player of the Month card from earlier? I had to complete a whole series of tasks like this to get it. Alternatively, you gain experience points, which are now called season points. Bear in mind that Ultimate Team consists of roughly twelve themed mini-seasons. And it’s these season points that let you ascend the season levels, like in a role-playing game. Each level unlocks new rewards. The higher the level, the more powerful the reward.

The beauty of this system is that the tasks and seasonal rewards always have a theme. During the European Championships last June, for instance, it was all about the national teams. Even though I had my «regular Ultimate Team» for the Champion Finals, the objectives and season rewards meant that I sometimes mixed things up with my team in other modes and used different players that gave me good rewards.

This is yet another element that provides a lot of variety in the game.

It’s worth taking a good look at the tasks and trying to solve several at the same time. For example: «score three goals with a Brazilian player, put six League 1 pros in your starting line-up, set up five wing goals and keep a clean sheet in three games.» This brings variety to your teams and style of play. More importantly, it also equates to handsome rewards.

Important tools: if you’re going to spend money, spend it right

There are so many ways to collect packs, cards and coins in Ultimate Team that it really isn’t necessary to invest real money. Over the course of the game, you’ll also put together such strong, great teams. Trust me.

Admittedly, it’d be easier if you could just get 200K coins from a third-party provider for 50 francs and set up a strong team straight away. But then what? The next season’s coming. There’ll be new, better cards again. You’d have spent your money for nothing. Besides, where’s the fun in buying cards directly instead of earning them? If you’re going to spend real money, it’s better to spend it on third-party tools rather than coins.

Sounds cryptic. Let me explain. What you end up spending on these tools today, you’ll save twice and three times over later in-game. And the money doesn’t go to EA, which makes enough with Ultimate Team anyway. If that’s not a good argument, what is? On that note, here are my two favourite tools:

EasySBC

EasySBC is a real game changer. But it comes at a price. The Ultimate version is a whopping 80 dollars a year, while the slightly cheaper Elite version will «only» set you back 56 dollars annually. But what you get in return is quite something:

• My Club Overview: your team is imported and analysed in real time. In other words, you can see at a glance which of your unused players could earn you a lot of profit on the transfer market.

• AI SBC Solver: EasySBC suggests the most favourable SBC solutions – with players from your club. No more spending unnecessary coins on supposedly missing pieces of the puzzle on the transfer market. You can solve SBCs every minute on PC via the official EA Companion App.

• AI Squad-Builder: thanks to team analysis, EasySBC harnesses team analysis to suggest the best possible combination of players and formations for your club. You can even set filters so the AI only selects players from a specific league. Or you can have the AI suggest certain upgrades based on a set budget. However, the AI Squad Builder isn’t available in the Elite version.

As you can see, AI is the key word here. Even the free version of EasySBC has something up its sleeve that nobody else has: meta ratings.

This is an alternative rating system born out of collaboration with professional gamers and sophisticated algorithms. As a result, it takes into account the value EA assigns a player, as well as their playing style, height and much more. This makes it easier for you to find out which players are really strong at the moment and fit perfectly into your team – and which overpriced players you should avoid.

For instance, Harry Kane may have a rating of 90 in the game. As an agile striker, however, a much cheaper Dembélé is a lot more suitable, even if he «only» has an 86 rating and is actually listed as a right winger in the game. In fact, Dembélé’s meta rating says he’s one of the most agile centre forwards in the entire game, at least for now.

So while some spend hundreds of francs to buy Harry Kane superstar for a few million coins, you spend 50K coins (and no real money) on the undervalued Dembélé – and also have the more suitable player.

This is exactly what makes EasySBC a game changer. Check out this Moneyball tool for Ultimate Team. And just like in the film of the same name, you don’t need to spend more money than your competitors in order to keep up with the best. However, you do need to spend it in a more clever way than them.

Futbin

Futbin is the sibling to EasySBC. It offers you just as comprehensive a player- and SBC database as EasySBC, but without AI, algorithms and meta ratings. At the start, it may even be easier to enter the world of player, card and transfer analysis with Futbin. But I only need it to find out the current transfer values of potential cards I want. Futbin updates them much faster than EasySBC.

Conclusion: tips at a glance

You’ve now got an insight into the fascinating world of Ultimate Team. It’s a mode full of possibilities, challenges, variety and, above all, fun. Keep these tips in mind to get the most out of your gaming experience:

• Play different modes: try Squad Battles, Division Rivals and Champions to improve your skills and earn rewards. Each mode offers unique challenges and opportunities to strengthen your team.

• Master the SBCs: use the Squad Building Challenges to turn unused players into valuable rewards. Think strategically and use the SBCs to improve your team in a targeted manner.

• Complete objectives and collect season points: this earns you packs, coins and season points. Climb the season ladder and secure valuable rewards that’ll take your team to the next level.

• Use tools like EasySBC and Futbin: these can help you make strategic decisions, find the best players for your team and save coins. Allow them to optimise your tactics and strategies and outwit your opponents.

Always know the score: in Ultimate Team, the journey is the destination. Enjoy the journey, build your dream team and celebrate your successes. With patience, strategy and a bit of luck, you can achieve great things in the world of Ultimate Team without spending real money.

Have fun.

Video games

EUR59,90

EA Games EA Sports FC 25

PS5, IT, DE, FR

49

Video games

EUR68,90

EA Games EA Sports FC 25

XBOX, IT, DE, FR

3

Video games

EUR51,90

EA Games EA Sports FC 25

Switch, IT, DE, FR

13

Video games

EUR59,90

EA Games EA Sports FC 25

PS5, IT, DE, FR

49

Video games

EUR68,90

EA Games EA Sports FC 25

XBOX, IT, DE, FR

3

Video games

EUR51,90

EA Games EA Sports FC 25

Switch, IT, DE, FR

13