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FIFA 21 Ultimate Team: The RB Leipzig Weekend League Challenge part 2
Part 2: Die Roten Bullen take on FIFA's toughest multiplayer competition.
If you're just joining us, last time we had the bright idea to take RB Leipzig into the fiery cauldron of the FIFA 21 Ultimate Team Weekend League. RB Leipzig may be flying high in the Bundesliga, but in FUT it's another story, with players like Yussuf Poulsen (78 rated) and Angelino (80) having their work cut out for them as they face off against thousands of Mbappes and Neymars.
The objective for the weekend is simply to regain our deposit - 11 wins would recover our 2,000 FUT Champions Weekend League qualification points. Can we do it? Let's find out.
Starting Strong
Poulsen is a key element in the FUT challenge team
© EA
After gathering as much expert advice as possible from the likes of Red Bull athlete Ryan Pessoa and professional FUT tactician Steve Stokes, we feel like we have a fighting chance of claiming those 11 wins, although Gold 3, our regular Weekend League finish, is surely out of the picture. Heck, 11 wins may be pushing it, unless EA miraculously releases a 95-rated Hwang Hee Chan card with Friday's Team of the Year promotion? (Spoiler: they do not.)
Throughout the Weekend League, we will use the fantastic FUT Track app to record our results, analyse stats and hopefully adapt in later matches. We are recording matches, too, so we can watch them back and accurately recount moments of real excitement, rather than relying on frazzled memory.
Following our experts' advice, we have already begun by 'warming up' in a Division Rivals game. We lost 3-1, but it certainly knocked out the cobwebs, and by the end of the match we were playing to our strengths, using Poulsen to hold up the ball effectively and pressing hard when losing the ball.
On which note, let's have a reminder what our team looks like (3-5-2 in-game):
- GK: Peter Gulacsi (85)
- CBs: Ibrahima Konate (82), Dayot Upamecano (82), Lukas Klostermann (85)
- Wingbacks: Marcel Sabitzer (85), Nordi Mukiele (84)
- CDMs: Angelino (80), Konrad Laimer (82)
- CAM: Emil Forsberg (82) or Dani Olmo (84) depending on our mood
- Strikers: Hwang Hee Chan (77), Yussuf Poulsen (78)
- Subs: Justin Kluivert (74), Kevin Kampl (81), Tyler Adams (76), Alexander Sorloth (77), Christopher Nkunku (80), Dani Olmo (84), Benjamin Henrichs (76)
We have redeemed our Weekend League entry (will we even earn back those 2,000 qualification points?) and we're off to load into our first game.
Games 1 and 2: The Journey Begins
RB Leipzig may often seem like an underdog to seasoned opponents...
© EA
It's a strong opponent. He or she has several Icons and a strikeforce built, predictably enough, around Neymar and Mbappe. Robben and Klaiber are patrolling the right wing, although the other flank looks a little weaker with an off-chem Ferland Mendy at left back. A strong card, obviously, but we'll take what we can get.
The critical thing to do straight out of the blocks is play our natural game based on the tactics we've developed. We're not even thinking about the opposition and their squad make-up. Press high, press hard, then fast vertical passing to Poulsen, and runs beyond him with Hwang and the wingbacks.
We get off on the right foot, passing around well and keeping possession. More importantly, we are regaining the ball quickly when we mislay it, and it's obviously frustrating our opponent, who starts using Team Press after 20 in-game minutes to harry us. We still haven't fashioned an opportunity of note in the first half, but that's fine for now.
Then something crazy happens. From a goal kick, Gulacsi sends the ball out to Nordi Mukiele on the right flank, who plays a simple one-two with Konrad Laimer and finds himself in acres of space behind Mendy. Our opponent seems to be struggling with player selection because we've already made it to the edge of the area by the time their Kante approaches. Mukiele isn't exactly Cruyff, but we can abuse the overpowered bridge dribble skill (double-tap R1/RB) and see what happens... Mukiele bursts past Varane! The keeper advances. And we dink it over him! 1-0!
Pip pip, it's half time, too. As we sit on the tactics screen fiddling with player instructions, we picture our opponent sat in an armchair, staring down the camera Michael Jordan-style, preparing for the comeback. "And I took that personally." Can we hold on?
Our opponent is certainly not happy. We are barely allowed to touch the ball for the first 20 minutes of the second half, and then they score a horrible goal from a corner. Gulacsi comes for it, but gets bundled over while punching it away, and Mbappe pretty much passes it into the goal. Ugh. There's a pause for substitutions shortly after the resulting kickoff, and our opponent brings on hipster super-sub Mitchell van Bergen and Adama Traore. They are certainly playing up to all the Weekend League cliches.
It backfires, though. Before the subs can get their bearings, we regain the ball from the throw-in that prompted the pause, and Forsberg somehow angles a low driven through ball straight into the path of Hwang, who ball-rolls past the onrushing keeper and slams it in for 2-1! There are only 25 in-game minutes left!
Before the words "can we hold on" even form in our head, though, it's properly over. Patience completely gone, our opponent loses the ball playing out from the goalkeeper and Poulsen thrashes it into an empty net.
Then it's rubber-band time for our opponent, as they stop playing completely and just do ball-rolls in the centre of the pitch. We steal the ball a couple more times to pad the stats, and it's a 5-1 win in our first match. Die Roten Bullen are up and running!
Straight into Game 2 without time to dwell and... we secure a rage-quit after six in-game minutes! We would struggle to tell you how, but we dispossess the ubiquitous RTTF Jules Kounde card straight after kickoff for Hwang to score the first, and then seconds later he blasts in a volley from one of those horrendously cheesy low driven crosses that we absolutely plan to abuse throughout the competition. 2-0, RQ, boff. Dreamland!
Games 3 to 5: Reality Bites
It's all in the positioning
© EA
We're on a roll, so it's onward to Game 3. Somehow, this opponent feels weaker than the other two. Their team is clearly made up of untradeable cards, presumably so they don't get stung by having their coins tied up in expensive players during the predicted Team of the Year market crash. But the ball stops bouncing in our favour in this match. It feels very even, and we take a 1-0 lead through another neat Mukiele-Poulsen-Hwang combination, but then in the 85th minute disaster strikes.
Having forced Van Bergen (seriously, ban this card) out wide and conceded a corner, we watch the ball sail happily towards Gulacsi... who doesn't even jump for it. Flashback Aguero -- all 5'8" of him -- leaps like an Argentinean salmon and bops it into the goal. Discombobulated and with the squad knackered, we hold on in extra time, but then a barely functioning Marcel Sabitzer gets outwitted at a throw-in and Flashback Arjen Robben races through to pop the ball round Gulacsi. Our first defeat, 2-1 to a 118th-minute winner. Ouch.
It's at this point that we should remember the words of basically everyone we spoke to last week. "I'd say as soon as you lose a game, take a small break for maybe 10 minutes and come back," Ryan Pessoa had told us. "I think even if you win four games in a row, you should take some kind of break, just because people's concentration span isn't that long," FUT Weekly podcast host FW Ben told us.
But we ignore them and dive straight into another match. Miraculously, it's another very fast rage quit. 1-0 within a few in-game minutes and our opponent is gone. Humiliated by our underpowered team? Impatient to get games in? Who knows, we'll take it.
Every fibre of our being is now telling us to stop playing and take a break. Except, it seems for our brain and thumbs, and this time we get stung, hard. By the time we do score, in the second half, we have shipped five goals. Some were poor. Notably, a Konate own goal where the French defender tripped over Gulacsi and the ball trickled in. But the others were defensive errors: playing out from the back too quickly, bringing centre-backs rushing out and leaving space behind, and sending Gulacsi haring out of his penalty area to get chipped from distance. Concentration has lapsed. Time to stop playing and take stock.
Games 6 to 10: Back to the Grind
At this stage, the FUT Track summary makes for pleasant reading
© EA
With five games played, we are much better off than we realistically expected. Three wins and two defeats isn't terribly different to our usual Weekend League performance. The FUT Track summary makes pleasant reading.
We've made the decision to play 10 games on Friday. There's no rush and we suspect we will have the psychological edge late on Sunday evening when players are hurrying to finish their matches and our novelty team gets under their skin. Our pre-challenge expectations were low, too -- we would honestly be quite happy with 8-11 wins across the whole Weekend League -- so we feel as though we're ahead of schedule.
Then we surprise ourselves again in the games we play on Friday afternoon! We start off with a heavy loss -- 3-1, but it feels worse -- but heeding Ryan and Ben's advice, we step away this time and return refreshed, rediscovering our mojo in a 4-2 cruise where the opponent has a player sent off for scything through Yussuf Poulsen in frustration.
Despite another heavy loss in the next match -- 6-2, including the full, much-hated Beach Towel celebration every single time we concede -- another quick break doing the dishes puts us in a better frame of mind, and we book two victories to round out our Friday matches.
We have been fortunate at times, playing some very impatient opponents who couldn't wait to quit once they conceded, but the key thing has been playing to our strengths and sticking to The FUT Coach's RB Leipzig tactics. The number of goals we've scored by pressing hard from the front to reclaim the ball has been encouraging, and Hwang's pace seems to be enough to keep us competitive against meta defenders.
Six wins, four defeats. We are over halfway to our goal with 20 matches remaining!
Games 11-20: When Saturday Comes
RB Leipzig's fetching third kit
© EA
Saturday, it turns out, is a game of two halves. Well, 'halves' is pushing it. It's more like a game of one very short period of continued success, followed by four fifths of a day of being battered by meta teams while the gameplay feels like straining treacle through concrete.
It really does start well, though. We arrive at our desk with a full pot of coffee and a good night's sleep behind us, and the first game is exactly like the one we played last week with The FUT Coach watching along. Mukiele, Laimer, Angelino and Sabitzer are like a brick wall across the centre of the pitch. No, not a wall: a wave. A wave of Red Bull splattering down upon our opponent whenever they manage to move outside their defensive third. As they struggle to pierce our secondary press, the attackers swoop in from behind and retrieve the ball. We lose count of how often Hwang just nips in and intercepts a pass.
The first half is a blur but it finishes 2-0 to Die Roten Bullen. The second is a masterclass in high pressing and quick transitions, and we run out 6-3 winners, with their goals all coming after we've taken our foot off the gas. Clearly in the mood, we roll straight into the next match and it's another cruise. 4-1.
It's at this point we start to dream of more than just 11 wins. 14 looks possible. Hell, even Gold 2 -- 17 wins -- isn't out of the realms of our runaway imagination.
But then it all goes wrong. Having taken a short break, we log back in and it's immediately obvious that this isn't going to be a good session. We're not experiencing lag, exactly, but passing feels stodgy all of a sudden, and players seem to react more slowly than they did an hour earlier. After losing the first game of this run 6-2 -- we just can't react to their movements fast enough -- we reset our router and reconnect to FUT, but if anything things have gotten worse. 6-3, another heavy defeat -- 'heavy' being the best word to describe how everyone feels. Even Hwang, who usually hares around the opposing defence causing mischief, feels leaden and unresponsive. 5-0 is our worst defeat yet.
We can't blame it all on gameplay. Some of it is mentality in the face of this external factor. Our head inevitably drops as goals rain in that we feel we can't do anything about, and that negativity seeps into the rest of our play. At the end of the day -- despite another afternoon break to freshen things up -- we have lost eight games in a row, comfortably our worst losing streak in the history of playing FUT! Our record stands at eight wins and 12 defeats.
Game 21 Onward: The Final Push
and another look at that clean RB Leipzig kit
© EA
We don't play at all during the day on Sunday. Partly this is to achieve a total mental reset, partly it's because we have a raging headache, and partly it's because we know that tempers and patience will be frayed on Sunday night as Weekend League players rush to finish their games before bedtime and the start of a new week. The number of rage quits you see on a Sunday night is always higher than any other part of FUT Champs.
The extra time helps us take stock. Forget about Saturday -- we had bad gameplay, which happens, a bad mentality as a result, and that exacerbated problems caused by the limitations of our squad. The positives to take from the first two days of play are obvious: in good gameplay, we are capable of beating enough opponents to secure Silver 1, aka 11 wins, which recoups our Weekend League qualification deposit. That was our goal at the outset and it's in our grasp: we just need three wins out of 10.
What's more, the team and tactics clearly work. When we did all the research, we knew we were onto something, but we were still doubtful about the team's ability to perform consistently, especially against smarter, more patient opponents. But our experience so far proves it out. Even with a weaker team, it's possible to stifle an opponent through Custom Tactics and a specific style of play. It requires discipline and planning, but it can be done. (And if all else fails, having a defence of absolute units to back things up doesn't hurt.)
Sunday isn't without drama. We do lose two matches quickly, but we also win two. With the clock ticking towards midnight, we are one win away from our objective.
Cantona leads a pack of incredible athletes in FIFA 21
© EA
Fittingly, what could be the final match of our journey is against the god squad from hell. There are six Icons playing, and not just scraps from the Base Icon SBC -- Prime Kaka, Mid Pele, Mid Ronaldo, Base Eto'o. Those cards alone cost around 15 million coins. We have played FUT since 2013 and have never had 15 million coins, or 10, or even five. Centre of defence is Rio Ferdinand and the much-hated Freeze Adama Traore. The most obvious weakness we can identify is that Traore is on 7 chem.
But as seasoned FUT players know, a credit card XI is no match for a practised player with a clear plan. R9 Ronaldo and Pele may be peerless attackers, but that's irrelevant if the defenders can't get the ball past the first or second press. We are relentless in the opening minutes, and where on Saturday the game fought us at every turn, on Sunday it feels as though the FIFA gods are on our side: every player selection input fires off correctly, passes ping from side to side, and the game is played entirely in our opponent's half.
You're probably familiar with the concept of 'flow' state, or being in the zone, so often cited in sports and video game reporting, and in hindsight this is the zenith we reached in the first half of this match. At one stage, Angelino -- such a poor card in FIFA compared to his real life performances -- initiates an attack, starting a one-two with Laimer, but instead of returning his pass, Laimer starts a one-two with Mukiele, and Muki does so with Hwang, until most of our front five is racing forward as one, the ball transferring slickly between them as our opponent's ludicrously expensive players advance falteringly and find themselves in the wrong position again and again. We can't stop passing, to the extent we ignore one, two, three great opportunities to shoot, and it's only on the fourth pass, Hwang having ball-rolled the last possible defender, that we pull the trigger, sending the ball arrowing into the opposite top corner at unstoppable pace. Watching the goal back afterwards, six of our players are in the opposing penalty area when the ball hits the net.
It's only 1-0, but our opponent is paying to win, not to put up with this kind of humiliation, and he forfeits the match.
We have done it. 11 wins on the board! Our record stands at 11 wins and 14 defeats, which is more than good enough for an underpowered squad of this nature.
Epilogue
We would love to tell you that we went on to claim Gold 3, but the truth is that we peaked in the god squad game. After another couple of defeats later in the evening, we decide to call it a night. It has been an epic journey, but claiming Silver 1 with this team feels like our mission has been accomplished.
Here are some stats from our adventure:
RB Leipzig in FIFA 21
© EA Sports
- Totalgoals: 64 scored, 84 conceded
- Possession: 50%
- Shot accuracy: 76%
- Pass accuracy: 83%
- Top scorers: Hwang Hee Chan - 26 goals, Yussuf Poulsen - 15 goals, Emil Forsberg - 13 goals
- Top assists: Hwang Hee Chan - 18 assists, Marcel Sabitzer - 14 assists, Yussuf Poulsen - 12 assists
- Wins in extra time: 1 out of 3
- Wins on penalties: 1 out of 1
So what did we learn from this experience?
The truth is that FUT Champions Weekend League can be a harrowing experience, especially if you're in the wrong frame of mind and experience poor gameplay conditions. But by setting yourself a challenge, using unusual players, and playing with carefully honed tactics of your own creation, the highs you experience will be higher than you'd think. Winning and losing games with this team felt like part of a process, or as modern football managers like to say, "a project". There was meaning to it. It wasn't just about grinding for rewards; it was about deepening our understanding of FIFA 21.
We wouldn't necessarily recommend playing through Weekend League with a novelty team. But would we keep playing with themed squads, using customised tactics based on real-world football teams? Absolutely. In fact, we recommend it.
And if Yussuf Poulsen ever gets a special card, we will buy that thing in a heartbeat!
