How to make money on the transfer market in FIFA 21 Ultimate Team

In FIFA Ultimate Team, coins are king. They are used for purchasing everything available within the mode, except that card packs can be purchased with FIFA points. This means that if you are looking to build a squad without using real-world money to buy packs, you will need to invest your hard-earned coins to see gains.

However, that’s not to say that playing matches and earning reward coins is the only way to make money on the game. Many of the top players on Ultimate Team create their unbelievable squads without spending a penny, and instead utilize the often unpredictable nature of the transfer market to fund their squads.

Most of the time, it simply takes time and effort to scour the market for the best deals, but if you’re willing to put the time in, you won’t need to open your wallet for FIFA points ever again.

Here are tips on how to make money on the transfer market in FIFA 21 Ultimate Team.

Check value trends before you sell a superstar

One of the best tools for playing the markets when it comes to Ultimate Team is the FIFA community page FUTHead, which collates data from the mode together in one place. While most of the information on player cards found on there can be theory crafted in-game, there are no stats regarding price trends that you can find on the transfer market page. 

This is means if you want to check the current prices on a card that you think has a high value, you are required to scroll through countless cards being auctioned to get a reflection of what they are worth.

Instead, keep your eye on the page of the player that you’re looking to sell on FUTHead. Here, the website scans data from the transfer market engine to calculate the lowest price that each card is actually selling for. Just like when playing stocks, prices fluctuate constantly, but reading the changes will help you know when to sell a player and when to hold on to them.

Real world performances can affect value

When it comes to trends of searches for FIFA, nothing causes a spike more than a player who has just put in a good real-life performance for their team. If a player scores a hat trick, you can bet that it causes players to immediately look for them in FIFA Ultimate Team to see if they can find a way to fit them into their team.

As a result, players who make an impression in the real world will make a similar impression on Ultimate Team, causing their value to spike. Usually, this spike doesn’t last long, but if you can buy players who are usually high value and are known for consistent real-world performances in the biggest European leagues, you can usually ride the spike to extra profit.

An excellent example of a player that this can apply to is Leicester City’s Jamie Vardy. He’s very quick and is a great finisher, but more importantly, he scores goals regularly in real life against teams considered bigger than his. Keep him in your pocket until he pulls out a great real-world performance, and you may be able to profit from the spike in player searches.

Take advantage of quick sellers

Everyone has to start somewhere when it comes to building their teams. Especially at the beginning, if you’ve committed to avoiding real-world expenditure on FIFA points, then the going will be tough. However, even cheaper players can start you on the path to making good money.

When listing a card, you have the option for different amounts of time that you can place it on the market for. Players looking to make quick sales of unwanted players from packs are usually going to put the player on the market just above its quick sell value. By targeting these players, you can get them cheaply to either use for your team or simply relist them, but with an enticing buy, it now values that is higher than your purchase value.

For example, getting a 76 rated player with a winning bid of 350 can then be relisted with a buy it now the price of 500-600 coins, which is often just about low enough for other players to snap them up to avoid missing out or waiting long periods of time for the auction to end.

Using this method with lots of cards, you should stand to make money in small increments. As you gain cash for the higher-profile players, you can begin to expand to high-value cards.

Utilize the FUT Mobile and Web App

If you’re serious about bringing in cash to your club, you need to be using more than just the services that are available in-game. You have two apps at your disposal, the web app and the mobile app, and both are better options when using the transfer market than the game itself.

Inside the game, many of the menus are not dynamic. This means that if you are on your transfer list page as you buy or sell a player, it will not refresh on the page, and you will need to exit and re-enter the page to see any updates. It may occasionally process in on the same screen, but it’s very unreliable.

With both of the apps, they work with the in-game engine at a much faster pace and without the need to re-enter to update. That should also mean that you lose out on last-minute bids less often because of it. It’s also much more flexible and faster in the apps, while switching between them and checking out trends, such as those mentioned in the first two points on this list, can be done faster. You can even switch between accounts if you play the game on multiple platforms.

A word of warning for those using the browser web app. We would not recommend using a third-party program to help you buy and sell players on the game as this carries a potential risk of having your club disabled or deleted completely due to exploiting the system. Use them at your own risk.

The attributes that players value highest

Not every top-rated player is going to be worth as much as each other. For example, Harry Kane is an 88 rated striker for Tottenham Hotspur, with dribbling, physical and passing attributes all rated above 80, and shooting at 91. However, the value placed on cards is often linked to the strengths identified in the game engine, which typically favors player speed and ability with the ball. 

In other words, because pace and skill move rating is so highly valued amongst players in-game, Kane, whose pace is 68 and only has three-star skill moves, will be valued lower on the market compared to someone like 84 rated Manchester United striker Anthony Martial, who has 89 pace, four-star skill moves, and similar dribbling points. 

Typically, the players with higher stat points in pace and dribbling, and 4 star or higher skill moves will fetch the highest prices on the market. This, in turn, means that their prices have the best chance of spiking, and as such, even lower-rated cards with high numbers in these three areas are great options for making a profit.

Not from one of the five big leagues? Don’t bother

When it comes to cards that people actually want to buy frequently, you are almost exclusively limited to the five leagues: the Premier League, Serie A, La Liga, the Bundesliga, and Ligue 1. Outside of squad building challenges, where you might see some small boosts to prices on players from smaller leagues, very rarely do the prices spike high enough to invest in a player outside of the elite European divisions.

This is due to the amount of attention given to these leagues in the real world. They represent the largest chunk of the fan base, and unless players are looking to combine players from national teams or create hybrids, the majority of squads will be made up of players from these areas. Unless there is a dynamite player whose stock is increasing rapidly with the right attributes, if they aren’t in the top five leagues, we would suggest you ignore them.

---