EA Sports FC Ultimate Team
A game you buy at full price that then sells you randomized player packs — and wipes your entire squad every twelve months so the cycle starts over.
The cost, in short
Pressure
088
To ending
— — —
No scripted ending — live service
How this rating was reached
Score of 88/100 is above Genshin Impact (78) because squad strength directly determines competitive results, EA's own page labels the packs 'Paid Random Items', and the annual release wipes the club so the entire purchase cycle restarts every twelve months — a structural pressure the gacha games do not have. Below Diablo Immortal (98) because there is one randomization layer rather than two stacked, and a player-to-player transfer market offers a non-random route to a specific card. No cost-to-progress figure is published: EA states none, and the real cost is the base game plus unbounded pack spending, repeated annually. EA's own release-dates page does not even state a USD price for the game itself, directing buyers to third-party storefronts instead, so no figure here is taken from press coverage. releaseYear 2025 refers to the current annual title (EA Sports FC 26, released 26 September 2025). This page covers the Ultimate Team mode rather than one edition, because the monetization design is what persists across editions while the squads do not. hasEnding is false: seasonal live-service mode with no scripted conclusion.
What the monetization actually looks like
Ultimate Team is a mode inside a full-price annual release, and it sells randomized player packs on top of that purchase. EA's own product page carries the content descriptors "In-Game Purchases" and, explicitly, "Paid Random Items" — the publisher's own label for what most people call loot boxes.
Squad strength in Ultimate Team directly determines results in the rated competitive modes, which is what separates this from a cosmetic store: the randomized purchase buys competitive power, not appearance.
There is one genuine mitigation worth naming. A player-to-player transfer market exists, so a specific card can be bought outright with in-game currency rather than gambled for. That is a real non-random route to a target, and it is why this scores below the games where randomization is the only path.
The annual reset is the part nobody prices in
The structural feature that makes this mode different from every other live-service game on this site is that it does not carry forward. When the next annual edition ships, the club does not migrate — the squad you assembled is gone, and building a competitive one starts again from nothing, on top of buying the new game.
That means the honest unit of cost here is not "what does it cost to build a good squad" but "what does it cost to build a good squad, every year, indefinitely". Most cost discussions quietly answer the first question and present it as the second.
No ending, by design
Ultimate Team runs in seasons with no scripted conclusion, and the annual reset means there is not even a stable endpoint to work toward across editions.
Sources
- 01EA SPORTS FC 26 Football Ultimate Team — official feature page with 'Paid Random Items' disclosureElectronic Arts (official) ·
Full method behind these ratings: see our methodology.
Ratings are editorial judgments based on the sources cited above. They are not a guarantee of current pricing or mechanics, which can change after publication — check the source directly before making a purchase decision.