Team chemistry is the most important factor in any Ultimate Team. While not immediately apparent as a player's pace or shooting statistics, the overall team chemistry dictates how well your outfit works together. Player positioning, teamwork, passing and more all come together thanks to player chemistry, and Shaikh believes that getting this as high as possible is vital.
"The first thing I always encourage people to do is really try and think about getting a team with good chemistry because that's the bit where they kind of will perform the best that they can," Shaikh explains, before going on to discuss how even relatively modest-quality teams can perform better thanks to good team chemistry. "Chemistry makes a really big difference and you can get a lot out of a lower quality team."
Your first squad in FIFA Ultimate Team is not going to be full of all-star quality players, so in order to compensate for that, build a team that's well connected so you can at least get some cohesion and unity from them. The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts thanks to chemistry. You'll notice that teams with low chemistry will see players out of position, misplacing passes and making errors far more frequently than high-chemistry outfits.
Back to TopMany newcomers to Ultimate Team do so with the idea of bringing together all of their favourite players to create their 'Dream Team', much like a digital Panini sticker album. But in Ultimate Team, it's not always about creating the Galacticos, more akin to the Louis Van Gaal strategy of buying players to suit your philosophy, as Shaikh explains.
"I think new users tend to just think 'I'm just going to go for a bunch of players that I know and like, and I'm going to shove them together'," he says. While it's important to make sure your team works well together in terms of their own chemistry, you also need to know how best to utilise the unit.
Having the likes of Akinfenwa up front is only useful if you have midfielders and wingers who can pump the ball into the box. Equally, a three-man midfield needs full-backs who overlap on the wing to avoid congesting the middle and limiting attacking options. Learn which player statistics apply to your style most; be it skill moves, pace, strength, attacking/defensive tendencies and even the Chemistry Style cards to best accentuate these characteristics.
Back to TopFIFA Ultimate Team includes a huge amount of players from all around the world. In order to find value in the transfer market, it helps to go micro in your searches. "At the beginning the main thing is focusing on a relatively small sub-section," Shaikh says, "use the transfer market, pick up some relatively inexpensive players, all from the same league, all the same nationality, try and get yourself to 100 chemistry."
Each year it can take some time before we discover which leagues prove to be the most expensive and which become gold mines. A few years ago the Bundesliga proved to be a great place to find cheap, high-quality players, just before Borussia Dortmund had their breakout year, so seeing how the market evolves over the first month or two of release will help build relatively inexpensive teams.
Back to TopFIFA Coins are the main currency in Ultimate Team. You can earn these coins from selling cards or playing matches. Depending on the difficulty of the match (offline) or how far advanced you are in divisions and tournaments, the rewards can vary significantly. Coins can be docked for offsides, fouls, cards and more.
Knowing how to use the transfer market not only to buy cards on the cheap, but also sell your players for either a small loss or tidy profit, will help maintain a decent coin purse. Also, using the EA Sports Club Catalogue will help give earnings boosts to fill it up more quickly.
"[Use] the Football Club Catalogue, some of the earlier seasons you can kind of get some reasonable rewards." Shaikh says. "A lot of that comes down to the skill of the player. Online events tend to give much more rewards but they tend to be much more difficult as well. A couple of the tournaments, depending on what skill level you can play at, can be quite rewarding as well."
"Just dabbling in the transfer market is a good way of building up a coin purse so even just getting yourself a couple of players, understanding an almost a narrow portion of the transfer market [will help]. If you look and say 'well I'm constantly building La Liga teams, well maybe I need to understand the prices of La Liga players under 5,000 [coins]', then I can pick some up, play a few games with them, and then maybe make a bit of coin profit on them as well. And I think you can obviously be doing that at the same time as playing matches."
FIFA 16 includes a new mode called FIFA Draft, where players can pay 15,000 coins to enter and build a dream team of stars to take on either AI or other players in a knockout tournament of up to four games. The minimum reward you earn will match the value of the entry fee, in the form of packs, players or coins, but the higher the win streak, the greater the reward. This could be an early means of building up coins and reinvesting them in other ways and turning a profit. So if you're confident, perhaps this new mode is a place to earn some quick cash.
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