Aryaman S

FUT Champs Weekend Triggers Massive FC 26 Market Crash

FC 26

The world of EA Sports FC 26 Ultimate Team is currently experiencing a significant market crash, causing widespread player price drops and creating a turbulent economy for traders and squad builders alike. While market fluctuations are common in the game’s cycle, the speed and severity of this particular crash have caught many in the community off guard.

While market instability is an inherent part of the game’s economy, the current notable and widespread decline appears to have gathered significant momentum around the first weekend of major competitive play especially after FUT champs, something I have covered in another article. However this crash is happening earlier and is more aggressive than in previous years of the franchise so what is the cause?

The most visible sign of the crash is the sharp decline in the value of many meta players which is an effect of players selling their weekend league teams.

The consensus among the trading community points to a combination of intentional game design changes by EA and the impact of in game content releases.

One of the most frequently cited reasons is EA’s shift toward rewarding players with untradeable items.

  • Less Coin Generation: Rewards from key game modes like Division Rivals and Ultimate Team Champions (FUT Champs) often contain a heavy bias toward untradeable packs and player picks. This significantly reduces the supply of tradeable players and, crucially, limits the amount of pure coins injected into the market. Players aren’t earning as many coins to buy cards, driving demand and prices down.
  • Tradeable Market Shrinkage: Since many good cards are now earned as untradeable items, a smaller pool of coins is chasing a smaller pool of tradeable cards, making coin accumulation and trading for profit more difficult for the average player.

Regular in game content releases are providing an influx of powerful new cards, which naturally devalues the cards that came before them.

  • Weekly Promotions (Promos): New promotional content like Ratings Reload or Cornerstones in the early cycle introduces more powerful players, causing a drop in the prices of the older, now comparatively weaker, “meta” cards.
  • Squad Building Challenges (SBCs): The release of desirable Player SBCs encourages players to open their stored packs and submit their high rated cards, creating temporary fluctuations in the fodder market but generally increasing the overall supply of player items.

EA has openly discussed its intention to slow the pace of the power curve in FC 26 compared to previous titles.

  • Lateral Upgrades: Initial campaigns are structured to provide more lateral upgrades, cards that offer different but not vastly superior attributes to keep the market balanced and keep Gold cards in the game longer. However, when a genuinely powerful, meta shifting card is released, its arrival can cause a disproportionate drop in the value of its alternatives.

However this maybe just a case of the FUT champs effect and panic selling. As i had mentioned in my previous article, traders buy players on Wednesday and Thursday at a cheaper price to sell them at a higher price on Friday to Champs players and here is the evidence. This is the price graph of Reijnders, last Friday he cost 124K, he then dropped to 78K as seen in the picture below and has now risen to 100K in price. There is no market crash but rather a rumour being spread around by traders to profit from, as well as the points stated above.

Let us take another player’s price graph to show this trend of a more expensive player, Aitana Bonmati is the meta player in the midfield position. She was trading around 600k on Friday and on Tuesday morning she dropped down to 420K and is now back upto 500K.

In essence, Weekend League provides the fuel (supply/rewards) for the volatility, and traders provide the engine (buying/selling activity) that drives the market’s sharp, predictable weekly fluctuations. The market is fine and please do not panic sell, check sites such as Futbin for price graphs and keep an eye out for any fishy behaviour.

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