I spent way too long watching my Salah card lose 40,000 coins in value. Just sat there refreshing FUTBIN like a lunatic while EA announced some new promo I hadn’t heard of. And it hit me — again — that I’m not really playing football here. I’m playing the stock market with shin pads.
Most FUT players figure this out eventually. Some figure it out after they’ve already spent hundreds. The lucky ones figured it out before.
Why Opening Packs Feels So Good
Okay, so there’s actual research on this. Studies found that gaming addiction directly predicts how much people spend on FIFA Points, and the biggest motivator wasn’t even wanting better players — it was wanting to feel in control. Autonomy, they called it. People spend money because building a team feels like self-expression. Belgium actually banned FUT packs because they classified them as gambling. EA just… turned off the ability to buy them with real money in Belgium and kept going everywhere else.
I’m not going to pretend I’m above it. When I packed TOTY Messi two years ago I literally stood up from my chair. My hands were shaking. Over a digital card that would be worthless in eight months when FIFA 24 came out. But at that moment? Pure joy.
The lights, the animations, the walkout when you pack someone good, the slow card flip — all of it triggers your brain’s reward system in the exact same way as leading gaming platforms like Odds96 Online do.
You know, I’ll play FUT anyway. I’ll probably buy the next one too. The actual football gameplay is fun when I remember to actually play it instead of obsessing over my coin balance.
You’re Trading Whether You Want To Or Not
The transfer market in Ultimate Team isn’t a side feature. It’s the entire game, honestly. EA makes something like $1.5 billion a year just from Ultimate Team — not from selling FIFA, from the microtransactions inside it. I remember reading that they pull in around $3,000 every minute from pack sales. I had to re-read that three times because it sounded made up.
So when you buy a player, you’re not just building a squad. You’re participating in an economy that EA has spent years perfecting. Supply and demand, market manipulation, seasonal crashes, speculation — all of it. The people who get really good at FUT barely play actual matches. They’re on the companion app at 6am sniping cards before work.
There’s this term the industry uses: “whales.” That’s the small percentage of players who spend ridiculous amounts of real money. Apparently something like 90% of loot box revenue comes from them. Everyone else is just… there. Trying to compete with coins we grinded for while some guy drops $500 on packs during his lunch break.
The Crashes Will Humble You
Nobody warned me about market crashes my first year playing FUT. I’d saved up for weeks to buy Kante — this was back in FIFA 21 — and felt genuinely proud when I could finally afford him. Three days later EA dropped Team of the Year and his price tanked by a third overnight.
I hadn’t done anything wrong. I just bought a player at the wrong time.
This happens constantly. Black Friday, Team of the Year, Team of the Season, random promos EA invents to sell packs — every single one floods the market with new cards and tanks existing prices. The veterans know to sell everything beforehand and sit on liquid coins. They’re basically short-selling their own squads.
The thing that gets me is how predictable it all is. TOTY hits in January, TOTS in May, Black Friday obviously in November. The crashes happen at the same time every year. And yet I still get caught out because I’m actually trying to, you know, play football with my team instead of treating it like a day trading portfolio.
The Stories That Don’t Make It To YouTube
Pack opening videos are entertainment. What you don’t see are the people who spent their rent money chasing that same feeling and got nothing.
There was a guy who made news a few years back — middle-aged, spent around £13,000 on Ultimate Team over three years. That’s nearly a house deposit. He said the pack system felt like a casino, and he wasn’t wrong. Another story I came across was some kid whose parents discovered he’d spent over $8,000 on FIFA during lockdown. Eight thousand dollars. On cards that don’t exist anymore.
One trader I follow talked about how his FIFA Points habit got worse than gambling ever did for him. What finally broke the cycle was reading EA’s terms of service and realizing he never actually owned anything. All those cards, all that money — he was basically renting pixels from a company that would shut down the servers whenever they felt like it.
The annual reset is the cruelest part. Every September your god squad becomes worthless. The millions of coins, the Icons you grinded for, the money you spent — all of it resets. Nobody cares what team you had last year. It’s just… gone.
What The Actual Traders Do Differently
The people making millions of coins without spending money approach FUT completely differently than I do. They don’t really play the game. They play the market.
There’s this thing called the Bronze Pack Method that’s been around forever. You buy the cheapest packs — 750 coins — and sell literally everything inside. Sounds tedious because it is. But people swear by it for building a starting bankroll.
The more advanced stuff involves predicting what EA will do next. If there’s a big match between Liverpool and Real Madrid in real life, Marquee Matchups might require players from those clubs — so smart traders buy them cheap beforehand and sell when demand spikes. It’s basically insider trading except the insider information is just paying attention to EA’s patterns.
The traders who really make coins watch the content calendar like hawks. They know when to sell before crashes and when to buy at the bottom. They understand that Thursday nights are peak selling time because everyone’s building Weekend League squads. They track price ranges and SBC requirements and fodder values.
It’s a part-time job. Which is exactly why most people just buy FIFA Points instead — EA made spending money the easy option on purpose.
My mate from work does this properly. He’s got spreadsheets. Actual spreadsheets tracking player prices across different times of day. He claims he made 2 million coins last month without playing a single match. I believe him, but I also think he’s insane. That’s not a game at that point — it’s unpaid labor for a company that’s already making billions.
Hi! I’m Bryan, and I’m a passionate & expert writer with more than five years of experience. I have written about various topics such as product descriptions, travel, cryptocurrencies, and online gaming in my writing journey.
