FIFA 21 players are using a 'Golden Goal' rule to avoid grinding for rewards

The FIFA 21 community has come up with a 'Golden Goal' rule to help players avoid a significant Icon Swaps grind. 

Recently, the first batch of Icon Swaps - tokens that can eventually be swapped for powerful, Icon player cards - arrived in-game. To earn them, you'll need to complete challenges, the first 11 of which are already available. Of those, eight are completed by taking part in Live FUT Friendlies, but to earn everything currently on offer, you'll need a total of 45 wins. That represents hours and hours of game-time, even if all you do is win. Assuming a roughly 50% win-rate, you could be playing for more than 24 hours before you earn everything.

To help avoid that grind, however, players have adopted their own, unofficial, Golden Goal rule. As reported by Eurogamer, the first player to concede a goal will immediately concede the entire match, granting their opponent a legitimate win in a fraction of the time a full (truncated) 90 minutes would take to play out.

As these matches are only friendlies, the losing player doesn't really lose out on anything but pride, but the community-driven approach isn't universally popular. While the FIFA subreddit has plenty of posts celebrating the community's efforts, there have also been disagreements when players choose not to abide by the 'rule', as well as concerns that it could lead to EA moving the goalposts by implementing caps on the number of games players can play at a time. How long this situation is allowed to continue remains to be seen, but with more Icon Swaps seemingly on the way, it seems that a large chunk of the community will be keen to keep it going.

What's better than an easy win? Securing the perfect from our list of the best gifts for gamers, of course!