The Backpage | FUT 12 – BUILD BETTER… WIN MORE

In this week’s Backpage, football journalist and FIFA fan Darren Cross looks at how to build a top team without wasting valuable coins, and why you’ll win more games as a result…

Last week I sold Swansea winger Nathan Dyer for 29,000 coins in Ultimate Team. I mentioned this to a friend of mine who also plays FUT and he looked at me like I’d just told him a huge and unbelievable lie.

It didn’t help when I added that I actually should have got around 5,000 more than the final price, but I let Dyer go cheap because I needed a quick sale. Then he looked really stumped after remembering he’d just paid less than 2,000 coins for Lille winger Eden Hazard, who is clearly a top player worth many millions more than Dyer in real life. My confused friend wanted to know what on earth was going on.

So I explained that Dyer is worth so much because he’s one of the most desirable silver, English, Premier League wingers due to his great pace and dribbling stats. For managers building a high chemistry team using these criteria, Dyer is one of the best options – hence his asking price.

There are plenty of managers building chemistry-packed teams full of players from one of the nine most popular nations and playing in the biggest leagues, so there’s loads of demand to trade these players. In this case for example, by going for a silver Prem team a FUT manager has plenty of players to pick from and most of them will be very good, like Dyer. Additionally, by searching for silver English players he again has a wide choice because there are loads of excellent ones in the game.

There are comparatively far fewer Belgian players in the game so fewer managers choose to build all Belgian teams (although I have done this recently and it’s a fun team to use at gold level). Obviously this means there aren’t so many managers out there searching for Belgian wingers. On top of that, a gold winger like Hazard isn’t going to be the very best option out wide if the manager is trying to build the best gold team possible, and so Hazard costs less than Dyer.

Before building any team in FUT, taking the time to find out which players are the best for their level in their respective positions and how much they’re worth is really going to help you out.

There are three main reasons for this…

1 – YOU’LL MAKE MORE COINS
Before you trade any player you don’t need, take a minute to have a look at their stats, their nation and their division. Whether they’re bronze, silver or gold, if they have very good scores in areas like dribbling, pace and shooting, and if they’re from popular leagues and nations, then there’s a good chance they’ll be worth more to trade than to quick sell.

You might only get an extra few hundred coins than if you did take the quick sell option, or you could land a 29,000 player like I did with Dyer. If I hadn’t have been paying attention, I might have chosen to quick sell him and I’d have lost out on 28,400 coins!

2 – YOU WON’T WASTE COINS
I’ve built a number of themed teams in FUT, but that’s mostly because I like putting different squads together to see how they do. I’ve had a silver Prem team, a silver Championship team, a gold Belgian team and a gold Brazilian skills team to name a few. They were all good fun to build, but when I want to focus on winning games I switch to my bronze XI, which is packed with the top players at that level.

Before I signed players for my bronze team, I did some searching around in the Auction, some research on YouTube and even some Googling to make sure that I would purchase the best option for each position. It was expensive – the team cost me just over 75,000 – but it was worth every coin. My bronze XI is the best team I’ve ever used on FIFA and more fun to play as than any team I can think of in any version, which is saying something.

If you’re only going to build one team with your coins and your aim is purely to win as many games as possible, by doing your research before you start buying you’re not going to waste a single coin on the wrong player.

When I talk about doing your research, it’s really important that you look at the nationality and division of the player as well as his abilities. For example, let’s take my silver Championship team I just mentioned. That cost me thousands of coins to put together, but if I had built that team with the sole intention of winning more trophies then I’d have quickly discovered that I’d wasted my money. The reason being that there are loads of better silver players in the Premier League, so if I met a silver Prem team in an all-silver tournament it’s a safe bet that I’d have got thrashed. You try stopping silver strikers like Cameron Jerome and Nathan Delfouneso when you’ve got Championship defenders at the back. It’s possible, of course, but difficult.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Championship teams or equivalent are not worth building or anything like that – mine is great to use. What I am saying is that if your goal is simply to win silver trophies, you’ll have more chance of success if you save your pennies, do your research and buy the likes of Jerome and Delfouneso instead of Nugent and Hines.

3 – YOU’LL WIN MORE GAMES
This is the best bit.

If you take the time to find the top players available for your chosen formation, the difference it makes to your win ratio will be huge. With my English bronze XI I’ve had about three defeats in something like 20 or 30 games, and two of those were because my internet connection failed while I was ahead. The one game I lost was against a team with pretty much the same starting eleven as me, and that was a real battle.

And the games are great fun. Some FUT managers have avoided building bronze or silver teams because they assume these players lack desirable attributes like pace and skills, but that really isn’t the case. My bronze XI right midfielder, Jon Taylor, has 91 for pace and can do four star skill moves. I’ve been popping out chopsticks and rabonas all over the place with him, and there are plenty of others just as good in my starting line-up.

No lack of fun here.

Well I hope this week’s Backpage has inspired you to build a top team. Remember, whether you’re going for bronze, silver or gold, it’s all about doing some quick research and identifying the best players for the formation you’re most comfortable with.

As always, thanks very much for reading and feel free to add me on Twitter @Darren_Cross where I’ll do my best to keep you updated with everything FIFA related.