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FIFA 21: How to prepare your club for Team of the Season
What the market will do, what to stock up on and when to buy.
Team of the Season is just around the corner in FIFA 21 Ultimate Team -- it may even be happening by the time you read this -- and this promo more than any other will see players overhauling their teams with new cards and huge fluctuations across the transfer market. We've been through it many times, however, so here are some hard-earned tips on how to prepare your club for the carnage ahead!
Brace for the market crash
Promotional events can really alter how the market works
© EA
Promos often precipitate changes in market conditions as anxious players sell off their teams to avoid being caught with lots of coins invested in fast-depreciating assets. Team of the Season does this more than perhaps any other promo.
"Team of the Season cards are very powerful compared to the average special card, and they are remarkably obtainable, which means you see them quite regularly" explains Red Bull athlete Ryan Pessoa. "Guaranteed TOTS player SBCs and guaranteed TOTS cards in Weekend League rewards means you will see a lot of these cards in teams, and this drives down the prices of virtually everything else."
If you have an expensive team and you haven't already sold off your most valuable assets, it's a tough call whether to do so now. If your players are very high end -- Prime or Moments Icons, Team of the Year, or mid-90s special cards -- then they are going to remain viable through Team of the Season and you may prefer not to sell them at all, whatever happens to their prices. The most recent FUT Birthday cards also include weak foot and skill move upgrades that won't apply to new TOTS cards, so players like FUT Birthday Renato Sanches (an SBC card) will likely be better in some respects than higher-rated TOTS versions.
Everything else -- low 90s and below, whether Icon or special -- is likely to have tanked or at least dropped considerably in the pre-TOTS selloff, so you need to decide how much you care about that. If you enjoy playing with those cards and you have a decent amount of coins to spend on TOTS activities anyway, there's no need to panic sell. If you have solid untradeable options to stand in for them, it might be worth hauling in as many coins as possible for TOTS just to be on the safe side though.
Build up your SBC fodder
You're going to want to complete as many SBCs as possible
© EA
When we say SBC fodder, we mean cards rated 84 and higher that are mostly used to complete high-value SBCs, rather than played with in-game. You probably knew that anyway, but it's worth spelling out. Having a lot of fodder on-hand during Team of the Season is a huge benefit, because there are a ton of SBCs that will be very tempting, and this is also the time of year when you might as well take a punt on SBCs because there isn't much of the cycle left for which to save things.
In previous years, EA has offered "Guaranteed TOTS" SBCs, where you can receive a guaranteed Team of the Season player from a particular promotional squad. These SBCs often require a decently rated squad, a TOTS card (driving up the price of the least desirable TOTS cards handed out in packs) and perhaps in-form cards. So it's a good idea to keep a few squads' worth of high-rated cards handy if you possibly can. This is a good time to take untradeable rewards from Division Rivals, and when the lightning rounds start to hit, it isn't a bad idea to invest some of your coins in 85s, 86s and the like as the market is briefly flooded with them to drive their prices down.
Even if you don't end up using all the fodder you have on SBCs, a lot of players will, and this will drive up the price of fodder during the periods immediately after the release of those SBCs. Keep an eye out every day during TOTS at 6pm BST, when new SBCs hit, because that is when we are likely to see rises in fodder prices that you can potentially sell into.
Assemble a good untradeable team
Buy cheap, usable in-form cards from past Team of the Weeks in a pinch
© EA
TOTS is a lot of fun, but you want to be playing FIFA 21 in the meantime too, especially if you're aiming to play Weekend League and earn some of those guaranteed TOTS rewards that go into red picks at this time of year. If you've been playing a lot this cycle, then you probably already have a very solid team of untradeable players harvested from SBCs, objectives and other sources, but if for some reason you are short on players (perhaps you *cough* put them all into the Prime Icon SBCs), then there are still some you can pull together without too much difficulty thanks to the abundance of objective players.
Milestones objectives have been a surprisingly good source of fun players this year, and if you still have any of those to do, then we recommend starting there. Players available at the moment include some great EFL Championship players like Emiliano Buendia and Rico Henry, while the higher-rated Eredivisie rewards like Mats Kohlert (a German left winger) and Danilo (Brazilian striker) are good in-game and easy enough to link to other cheap beasts from elsewhere in the FUT database.
SBC players are a harder sell purely because they take a lot of value out of your club, but if all you need is players to cover a few Weekend League matches, then you might consider the loan versions of Icons currently in packs. At the time of writing, you can obtain 5-match loan cards for Sol Campbell, Andrea Pirlo, Didier Drogba, Ian Wright, Gianluca Zambrotta, Claude Makelele, Peter Schmeichel, Rui Costa, Michael Ballack, Carles Puyol, Pavel Nedved and Patrick Kluivert, none of whom is less than a Prime Icon and none of whose loan card is likely to run you more than 8-15k coins with market-bought cards. Given that some of those cards are so good they don't even need a Chemistry Style to play well, there are worse ways to tide yourself over.
Another option is to buy cheap, usable in-form cards from past Team of the Weeks, then hang onto them during TOTS when demand for in-forms rises with SBC requirements. This way you can make use of the cards now and potentially profit from them later!
When to buy TOTS players
Knowing when to buy TOTS players can be a tricky art to master
© EA
This is the key question and the answer isn't straightforward, because it really depends on your intentions.
Let's start with FUT players who intend to build their endgame squad and then just leave it as is, whatever happens to pricing during TOTS. You want to play with those cards as soon as possible, because this is the last hurrah, or near as dammit. Perhaps you want a couple of Premier League beasts to supplement your team. Based on price fluctuations on popular FUT 20 TOTS cards like Jamie Vardy (95, ST) and Riyad Mahrez (95, RW), you certainly want to avoid the first weekend they are available, because initial prices never hold. The first major dip comes the next Wednesday, as the Guaranteed TOTS SBC drops and initial buyers panic ahead of Weekend League rewards. But you will save more coins the longer you wait. Both players mentioned dropped by 200k+ in the first week, but a further 250-300k over the next three. You're paying a premium to play with those cards when they're hot, then, and perhaps that's fine for you.
If you're a FUT player who wants to maximise play time but also save some coins, we recommend waiting until the very end of the promo when Ultimate Team of the Season drops, because whether the players make it into that squad or not (and neither Vardy or Mahrez did last year), the price takes another step down at that stage before settling into a gentle decline as we head into summer. Buying players at 350-400k each and losing a third of their value over the subsequent month or two would bother us less than buying them at peak prices and losing two thirds of their value in the same timeframe.
Finally, if you're a FUT player who wants to make money out of TOTS, first of all we recommend reading our dedicated guide to that elsewhere, but we would also be hesitant recommending TOTS players as good investments. There are a couple of potential sweet spots (the selloff on Wednesday just before FUT Champs rewards/Guaranteed TOTS SBCs can be a good time to buy meta TOTS cards to flip on the Friday as people buy up their teams), but it's a risky business. You're probably better off buying fodder during lightning rounds and selling it during Guaranteed TOTS SBC craziness.
Don't forget about FUT Champs Upgrade SBCs
Squad Building Challenge upgrades can be potent if used correctly
© SBC-Crafting-FUT-2
If you've been playing a lot of Weekend League during FIFA 21, then you may have a bunch of red players in your club taking up space who you would never consider using. Fortunately, Team of the Season can be a good time to convert them into players you actually want.
For most of the cycle, the Guaranteed 86+ FUT Champs Upgrade SBC is a bit of a trap, ready to hoover up your excess reds and then give you a few goalkeepers and non-meta players to choose between. But during Team of the Season when red picks include TOTS cards, the upgrade pack can really pay out. Remember, it gives you a random choice of three cards from all previously released red picks. Once we've had a few weeks of TOTS, there will be a lot of TOTS cards in that database.
The longer you wait, the better your chances, and when you do finally hit the button, we wish you luck getting your hands on something truly special!
