FIFA 19 bans Ultimate Team players from tournaments – does it matter?

FIFA 19 recently announced that Ultimate Team players will no longer be allowed in tournaments. As you can imagine, like with any change, this has a few people more than upset.

Ultimate Team, or FUT, players are like a who’s who of the greatest players in football history. These aren’t your regular season players but the Hall of Famers and the true greats. As such, their stats don’t change and they are relatively fixed in their capabilities.

This makes them ideal players for consistent performance, which is the lynchpin of success in any game, let alone a tournament. Noticing this, EA Sports have decided to no longer allow these players in team tournament rosters in order to even things out and make the team rosters varied.

Think of it as building a deck in Magic the Gathering or something like that: Using fixed stats and reliable performance year in, year out might give some veteran players an edge at tournaments. There’s a reason all of those stats are updated every iteration of the game, and this could be one critical reason.

Plus, the goal of eSports is to make things entertaining and varied.

Mid-season timing criticised

Of course, there are good arguments against this change, chief among them that the changes are coming mid-season, so to speak, and invalidate a lot of the work players have put in since the game’s launch in September of last year.

For a game like FIFA, that’s nothing to laugh at as some of these games can take hundreds of hours to master and unlock everything.

A lot of these concerns are put into stark relief by FIFA pro Ryan Pessoa, who tweeted, “We’ve had a long gap between qualifiers so players may have now decided to invest some money to bolster their squad, are you going to give them the money they spent back? You throw this curveball when we are in March it’s useless.”

Nonetheless, players will still be more than capable of assembling an awesome roster of players. As Eurogamer.net points out, the new restrictions mean that “you can only include a maximum of two Icon cards, a maximum of one 95+-rated non-Icon player, and a maximum of two 90-94-rated non-Icon players in your team. All other players must be rated 89 or lower.”

Insight into future direction of FIFA series?

The change is also going to happen regardless of controversy, possibly hinting at a future direction for the next FIFA game. The problem for a lot of publishers when it comes to the competitive aspect of their games is the balancing act that occurs between paid and universal content.

Whether this change has much of an impact on this year’s FIFA 19 tournaments remains to be seen. Ultimately, though, we think that this change doesn’t really impact the average player and is solely targeted at the eSports crowd.

That said, you can definitely expect these changes to pop up again in some standard format in the future, like FIFA 20, along with a whole host of other changes.