It has been quite a while since FIFA 16 was released, and the great majority of players tend to focus on Ultimate Team while entirely skipping Career Mode. While FUT certainly has its advantages, it doesn’t match the fun one gets from playing as an actual team, and making decisions that impact not just one game, but an entire season.
As such, here are a few tips for those FIFA players who have yet to journey into the world of Career Mode:
1. Don’t only look at the overall rating
This is one of the biggest rookie mistakes you’ll ever see, and something it can often limit your options. There are a great many players that tend to have low ratings overall, but almost perfect physical stats. These come in handy all the time.
Furthermore, as overall rating is position specific, a 70 rated CDM could serve as a perfect Striker, if he has the right stats. There is also the added benefit of training in FIFA 16. You could buy a cheap, physically strong player, and train him into one of your top stars.
Here is a prime example of this:
2. Sign players with expiring contracts
This is hands down one of the very best features in the game, and it comes in handy no matter how good your team is. The way it works is this: any player that has 6 months or less on their contract, and is over the age of 23, can be signed by any other club without the need to go through the player’s club. Of course, this can only be done in the January transfer market, and the player will only join your team the following summer. This is one of the best ways to steal great players — or simply sign them, loan them for 6 months, and sell them the following January transfer window for a big profit.
The best way to keep track of this, is to set up two scouting instructions specifically for this job after the summer transfer window has passed. You should do this after the window, because it is a waste of two perfectly good instructions beforehand, and 4 months is plenty of time for your scouts to search for every single player that fits your criteria.
The criteria you want to set are simple; you want to include as many players as possible, without making the criteria so broad you won’t be able to keep track of every player in it. Here are my two sample instructions;
As you can see, the first is set as Any Position, World Class, 0-1 years contract remaining, 22-35 Years old. The second is almost identical, except instead of World Class I set it to Promising, and I bring the age gap to 22-28, for obvious reasons. The reason I set the min age to 22, is that a lot of players tend to have their birthday between September and February, and you won’t want to miss out on great deals. Keep in mind, you can change the player attributes to anything you’d like, but avoid making it too specific. Pacey, Attack Minded and Tall+Strong are some other good ideas.
Here’s my favorite example of this trick in action.
3. Use your Youth Academy
I’ve seen a lot of FIFA 16 players not using this feature in Career Mode, because they feel it’s too much work, or not worth the trouble. They’d be wrong.
The best part of the Youth Academy, is the fact that you get a pretty specific idea of your player’s future potential. I’ve seen potentials as high as 89-94, which would make you train, loan or even play that player ASAP so you can get your future Messi in your first team.
From what I’ve noticed, the biggest barometer of how good your players can be is the quality of your scouts, and not where you send them. Some of my top youth players have come from Japan, China and Australia, the cheapest places to send your scout. You might think the £20-30,000 you would save is no big deal, but when you add that up over the extent of a 4-5 year career, the numbers start adding up. Another bonus of scouting these countries is that they tend to not be picked for International duty, which means they don’t get injured as often.
Furthermore, if you’re a hardcore international career player, you should definitely save one of your youth scouts for the country you are/want to manage, and send them there for 9 months at any given time.
Some good guidelines for picking which attribute to set the scout to are as follows;
- Any is almost always a valid option if you’re not looking for anything specific, and tends to get you the highest potentials
- Winger tends to equal pretty pacey players
- Attackers tend to have good Attack Position and Finishing stats
- Defensive Minded players (other than Full Backs) are generally pretty strong
- Goalkeeper is usually not a bad idea, as you get some crazy high potentials, and there just aren’t that many great keepers within a period of 5 years
4. Use Free Agents, a lot
Free Agents can be exceptionally useful, especially when you’re starting a lower tier career. Their biggest utility, comes in the fact that you can sign them at any point in the game (i.e. both during and after the transfer season), and as such would be useful for filling any holes that are left due to injuries or suspensions.
Another great factor is the fact that you can sell them in 6 months, for a bargain! There are quite a few Free Agents that can have as high as £600,000 value, and that’s before any potential growth. This is especially handy in teams that have a solid setup, but lack the financial means to improve quickly.
5. Do an international career, even if you won’t necessarily play it
Some of my greatest finds in the game have come from my international careers. Even if you get offered a random country, you can still simply go over every good player in the list, and get a fully detailed overview of their players without having the need to scout them. That might seem like a small bonus, but it certainly isn’t. This is especially important because of the random spikes in overall ratings some players have in every career.
If you don’t mind a few extra games every couple of months, I’d strongly recommend actually setting up and playing the international games too. First and foremost, you get the chance to play a completely different type of gameplay, which will keep you interested in the career for longer (guaranteed). You can set up a pacey, cross-into-the-box-and-header team as your main, and a pass it into the goal team as your International choice.
Secondly, it gives you the chance to play some amazing players, that you wouldn’t necessarily look into normally, but tend to be exceptional all the same. Nainggolan is a great example of this;
6. Actively plan your team’s playstyle, before even picking a team
Last but not least, let’s go over a very important factor that isn’t actually a part of the game; pre-planning. This doesn’t have to be in-depth, but simply deciding what type of Football you want to play and what formation you start off with can be quite useful. This is especially true if you’re on your third or fourth career and aren’t as fussed with playing your favorite club as you are with trying something new.
Are you going to go with pacey Wingers and strong Strikers? Or would you rather play a narrow passing game, making use of great dribblers and playmakers? Will you have 3 at the back and a strong midfield, or quick attack-minded Full Backs? All these decisions could have a great impact on your team selection and the first few players you buy, so it’s a good idea to plan ahead. You could even make use of Futwiz’s nifty Career Mode Squad Builder.
If any of you make use of some of these tips, feel free to post your screenshots and results in the comment section.
