EA Sports FC 24 will represent a huge change in the annual release of football games, and with EA’s footballing behemoth set to continue, we put forward 5 things that need to change in the game’s Ultimate Team mode moving forward.

Whether it’s called FIFA or EA Sports FC, the fact is that EA will still be producing a football simulation game that is bound to find the top bins like it always does. The strike might not always be pure, but it’s enough to tempt millions of consumers into buying it each and every season.

EA Sports FC 24 will have a different name, but the core of FIFA is still expected to be retained, which means we’re likely to see a whole host of familiar game modes returning – including the money-making Ultimate Team.

With that being said, we’ve drawn up a list of areas we think EA needs to work on when it comes to Ultimate Team, to make it a more fulfilling and engaging game mode.

1. Less promos & SBCs

I’ll just go ahead and say it, the oversaturation of weekly promos and excessive SBCs killed off FIFA 23 long before Christmas.

‘Special’ cards no longer feel special when EA are releasing several new players with amazing stats that also make top-tier Rare Gold cards redundant. In addition, TOTW is a shadow of its former self.

The knock-on effect is a completely dead market in which FIFA 23 only has two Rare Gold Players who sell for over 100K heading into 2023.

It was a bore to see everyone have Haaland spearheading their team by the end of November with a litany of SBCs surrounding him. Endgame teams shouldn’t be a regular sight in December, and it kills all the fun by having every game be an absolute sweatfest.

2. Scrap meaningless consumables

Is there a human being alive who enjoys the concept of Contracts or Healing? Like Fitness cards, they were a tricky yet strategic element of Ultimate Team in years gone by, but the abundance of packs, free packs, and rewards means you’ll simply never run out of them now.

They’ve become a nuisance for the sake of being a nuisance and add nothing to the game. I get that they’re also there to fill up packs as rares, but in that case, find new ways of going about it – as they did with Position Modifier cards.

3. Bring back the Win/Loss system for Division Rivals

The checkpoint system was an attempt to reinvigorate FUT Rivals and give it a shake-up. The only problem was that the classic Promotion/Relegation system across a set number of games wasn’t broken – so they didn’t need to ‘fix’ it.

Now, you can be permanently stuck in limbo in a division that you’re not entirely comfortable with for a whole season. This makes the grind for Weekly Rewards harder (another mistake was changing the total needed to 8 for the Reward Upgrade) and your gameplay more frustrating.

Bring back the old system, please.

4. Increase the challenge of FUT Moments for more rewards

The big concern was that FUT Moments was going to become stale very quickly, and that turned out to be the case as EA didn’t make them worth completing as the Season 1 rewards were tragically woeful.

It’s a novel concept having bitesize segments of gameplay to grind towards rewards, but therein lies the second problem – the gameplay is tedious.

Playing against a team with a guaranteed minimum of 20 in-game minutes left to play and winning by 2 goals on Semi-Pro is not appealing to anyone, let alone challenges that dumb the difficulty down even more.

Give us interesting scenarios where we can choose multiple different difficulty levels, a la Squad Battles, and offer us fun, varied objectives to complete with decent rewards on the line. Otherwise, FUT Moments risks being a great concept that ends up dying – like FUT Draft.

5. Guaranteed rewards for FUT Champions

Unless you’re finishing extremely high up in FUT Champions, then it’s a serious case of Forest Gump syndrome with FUT Champions as you literally have no idea what you’re going to get.

Now, in fairness, big respect has to go to EA as they reduced the original 40 games down to 30 and now to 20, but for lots of people, 20 is still a hefty commitment. So, if you’re going to battle your heart and soul out to try and rack up as many wins as possible, then you want to be rewarded.

Worse still, players who are getting 12-16 wins, sometimes more, are getting amazing rewards on paper, but being shafted when it comes to their actual prizes. It would make sense to implement a system similar to Rivals in that players can pick from two or three rewards, with at least one option guaranteeing you an 86+ player for example.

These are just some of the ways in which we’d go about improving EA’s football game moving forward as we head into the new era of EA Sports FC.