FIFA 14 Ultimate Team Guide

The Basics of Building a Squad

Anyone can put together a team of footballers. What's the right way?

When starting your team in FUT, you’ll be given a pack of bronze cards that will give you enough players to get started. On top of that, if you are a returning player, EA Sports Season Ticket holder, or received a pre-order code for packs, you’ll be able to open packs those packs as well. No matter what, the team you’ll start with is very basic and will have a low overall rating. To turn your team into a well-oiled machine, you’re going to need a plan.

The very first thing you should do with your squad is play the Starter Cup under Single Player Tournaments. This tournament is on Amateur difficulty and has no squad requirements. After beating this, you should have about 2,000 coins on top of the 3,000 you are given at the start of the game. With 5,000 coins you’ll have a great starting amount.

Use that 5,000 coins wisely! Don’t start picking up players randomly. Go into the Transfer Market with a plan for your squad. This is the time when you are going to need to make a decision about the chemistry off your squad. Do you want to it to be based on a nationality, a league, or even a single team?

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When deciding this, it’s recommended that you take a peek at sites like FUTHead.com or UltimateDB.nl to see a full list of cards that are available in Ultimate Team. For instance, you don’t want to try to make a Gold level United States squad - there are only a total of 8 Gold cards, 3 of which are Goalkeepers. There simply aren't enough players to field a squad!

To have the best team, you’re going to want to start looking at Gold players. As a nation, Brazil has most of any country (154 players). For a league, the Barclays Premier League has the most (237).

Gold Cards Per League

Barclay's Premier League (England) - 237
Serie A (Italy) - 192
Liga BBVA (Spain) - 175

Gold Card By Country

Brazil - 154
Spain - 133
France - 98

For these top leagues, you should easily be able to put together a squad of players that you can pick up for roughly what is known as “drop value”. Drop value is a pretty simple concept. It’s just the value of the card if you "quick sold" (i.e. “dropped”) it. For common Gold cards, that's around 300 coins. For rare Gold cards, it's around 600. For 5,000 coins you should be able to construct a starting lineup consisting of common and rare Gold cards from either a single nation or league.

So now, you're on your way!