FIFA 23 HOW TO CHOOSE THE BEST PLAYERS

When choosing the best players for your FUT 23 squad, you need to have in mind several factors, like chemistry, attributes and price.
FIFA 23 Silver Stars

Picking the Best Players


Ultimate Team differs from the other game modes by allowing each of us to build a preferred dream team. One that we’re identified with, that we feel like it’s ours. What makes this such a unique thing is the fact that we all have different tastes.

For us to build our team, it doesn’t matter if we know who the best players are or not because this matter is entirely subjective. Knowing which players will fit better in our playing style, formation, budget, and squad matters. This isn’t always an easy task. After all, new players’ cards keep coming along through the season, but we’ll give you all the tools needed to build better. Find out who’s your team in FIFA 23 Ultimate Team.

In our opinion, you should pick your players based on the following four criteria:

  • Chemistry;
  • Attributes;
  • More Characteristics;
  • Price.

Attributes


Let’s start by clarifying one thing: players are no more than numbers. Although Electronic Arts works hard to make us believe the players have unique identities, here’s the truth: they’re mere numbers and should be analyzed. We know this isn’t easy to accept for people who have experienced unique moments that once connected them emotionally to the players. Deep down, it’s good to believe they’re something more than numbers, but sadly, doing that is just avoiding the truth.

The player’s physique isn’t what affects his performance, not his traits or specialties (many of them don’t exist on Ultimate Team) either. It’s all on the attributes. They’re responsible for making us feel like each player is different. And they’re the ones you should carefully analyze when planning your squad. Many times, one player’s perception changes according to the game’s difficulty, formation, or for dozens of other reasons. Still, attributes are the most accurate element to compare players.

For pure laziness or lack of knowledge, many people make the terrible mistake of evaluating one player’s quality according to his overall rating. It just shows how popular and good in specific attributes a player is, making them be compared to others. The rating is NOT an average or reflex of all the attributes. It reveals nothing about the player’s true technical, mental, and physical attributes. Sometimes, FIFA 23 players with lower ratings can be better choices.

In FIFA 23 Ultimate Team, more than 30 attributes can only be viewed in-game, in the active squad & squad management menu, or in a database. You’re the only one who knows for sure about the attributes your players need because that’s according to your playing style. If, for example, you like to cross abuse, it’s preferred for you to have wingers with good crossing attributes and strikers with a good heading. On the other hand, if you like playing on counterattacks, you need to have fast attackers and midfielders with good passing. All this is very intuitive: you need to look at your squad line and think about what you want to do with it. If you’re still having a hard time, we’ll help you.

As we said, the player choice should be based on his attributes. Since they’re so many when we play, we get the feeling that it’s not possible to choose them only by calling the numbers. However, we forget that the numbers are much more accurate than our playing experience, which is corrupted by many factors: our inspiration, the opponent’s quality, changes in our team, several events during the game, etc… We’re not saying you shouldn’t choose players basing yourself on the experience you’ve had with them, but you should form an opinion only after a minimum number of 10 to 15 matches. Besides, most of the time, we can’t experiment with all the players we want to come up with the best team, so a good analysis of the players’ attributes first will surely be of great use.

But how is this analysis made? First of all, it’s important to know what each attribute means. Then, it’s also important to realize that the players with the highest attributes are not necessarily the best. Our interest here is to find the right players for our squad, which is done once we identify the characteristics they should have according to what we can afford. Imagine, for example, that you’re looking for a center-back to play between two other center-backs whose main role is to defend. The main characteristics he should have are tackles, Interception, Marking, Jumping, Strength, and Heading Acc. To find the ideal player, you’d have to find the one with the highest sum of these attributes. It would be good to have the other attributes high, but these are the ones you should focus on for this example.

However, things aren’t so simple as this (you already find it complicated?). It’s just that among these attributes, some are more important than others, and you should pay attention to this. It would help if you gave weights for each one of the attributes so that you can find a weighted average to reflect the perfection of the player you’re looking for. For this example, you could define Tackle worth 35%, Interception as 10%, Marking 20%, Jumping 15%, Strength 15%, and Heading Acc just 5%.

Even more rigorously, you could create a formula based on your playing style and formation, featuring coefficients that would reflect the importance of the other attributes, work rates, star skills, and weak foot. The ideal thing would be to create one weight for each attribute to get an absolute final value that wouldn’t depend on anything else. However, besides this being way too painful, making all these weights up would be hard for people who don’t flawlessly dominate the game. This is why there are other more straightforward strategies in order to determine how good a player is for our squad, and still, that would allow us to come to sufficiently good conclusions.

For people that want to keep things as simple as possible, we recommend them to analyze the basic attributes instead of the IG attributes. This is their role; this is how most people select their players. The basic attributes are the six face stats shown on the player’s card: pace, shooting, passing, dribbling, defending, and physicality. They’re no more than an average among the In-Game attributes.

To choose a player, you should focus on the essential attributes and casually on one or other IG attribute that you think is crucial for the situation. For example, continuing the case we presented above with the center back, all IG stats could be substituted by only one, defending, which doesn’t only reflect all these attributes but also weighs each one’s importance for the final stat. So you’d need to put that analysis along with strength, which isn’t included for defending, but physicality. For that reason, we must know what each of the six basic attributes corresponds to. Only this way, we’ll be able to simplify everything, reducing our analysis to these attributes and then taking a peek at the IG stats we consider essential. This knowledge also gives us the possibility to adjust the weights according to our preferences.

In general, these are the attributes we value most according to the positions:
GK | Reflexes, and Diving
CB| Defending, Physicality, and Pace for at least one of the center backs
RB/LB | Defending, Pace, and eventually Dribbling for RWBs and LWBs
CDM | Defending, Passing and Physicality
CM/CAM | Passing and Dribbling
Wingers | Pace, Dribbling, and Passing
CF/ST | Shooting, Physicality and Pace

All this hassle of finding the ideal players for our squad may look a bit complex since there are so many attributes to consider. However, it goes downhill when it comes to choosing a goalkeeper. They’ve got only six basic attributes. They don’t have IG stats, skill moves, or work rates. Nothing. Your formation and playing style do not influence this choice either. Seven numbers form them (yes, besides the attributes, there’s their height!). This is what makes goalkeepers seem different from each other.

You can surrender yourself from giving attention to feedback saying this is or that goalkeeper concedes quickly frequently. This is no good. You’ve seen two or three people complaining about that goalkeeper, but if you look closely, you’ll find more people saying the opposite. The only way you know if a goalkeeper is good or not is through his stats. In our opinion, the descending order of the importance of goalkeeper attributes is reflexes, diving, handling, positioning, speed, and kicking. It’s up to you to weigh them. Suppose you’re defensively passive when the opponent is roaming through the surroundings of your area. In that case, you should also give special attention to your goalkeeper’s height because when they’re shorter, the probability of a finesse strike going in is higher.

Chemistry


It’s unavoidable. When we want to start a squad from scratch, the first criteria for selecting the players is always chemistry. It forces us to plan how we spend the coins with antecedence and makes us base it all on one league or nationality. If you have the experience, you might as well choose to build a hybrid squad, but you’ll always be subject to the laws of Chemistry.

For people who don’t know, chemistry affects a player’s performance on the pitch. A player with low chemistry tends, for example, to fail at passing and shooting more easily. To build good chemistry, besides having your players play in their preferred position, they need to match the club, league, or nationality of other players. The easiest way is to create teams full of players exclusively from one league or of one nationality.

You’ll be conditioned to the players’ positions when you build a squad. You must choose 18 players, and at least one should be a goalkeeper. Then, if you don’t want chemistry negatively affected, you’ll have to buy players for the positions you need, according to your formation.

The question here is how far you can go and disrespect the chemistry. Most people will respect chemistry rigorously, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be like this. We advise you not to use a player with chemistry below 2, but it depends on the alternative. As long as he plays in one of his primary or secondary positions, he may be a better option if the choice is a player much worse with full chemistry.

More Characteristics


Using a simple spreadsheet program, you’ll be able to find the perfect player for your squad. You need to select the most essential attributes and give each one a weight. But then, what if some of the player’s characteristics weren’t measurable? That would be complicated. The truth is that, besides the attributes, you should also watch out for the five characteristics that define them:

  • Height
    Although it isn’t decisive, you should pay attention to the player’s height, especially if he’s a striker, a center-back, or a goalkeeper. However, it’s also useful for the CDM position. A taller player that has good jumping will win more headers.

  • Preferred Foot
    Carefully verify if you’re using your players correctly for their position on the field. Sometimes you should change their side to favor their preferred foot.

  • Weak Foot
    This type of characteristic should be decisive when choosing one between two players or more. It’s more important for the player to have good attributes than weak foot stars, but that’s still interesting for us. If you’re thinking of buying a finisher, don’t forget to check if he’s got a good weak foot. You’ll certainly notice the difference in the pitch between a player with a low and high weak foot.

  • Skill Moves
    Players with more skill move stars will get past the opponents more easily. They can also execute more complex technical movements, although this might be more of a show-off than an actual contribution to the team. Most three stars skill moves are as effective as (or more than) 5 stars’ skill moves. Like it is for the Weak Foot, the Skills Moves should determine which player you choose unless you’re a natural skiller who doesn’t need the means to succeed.

  • Work Rates
    Unlike the others, this is for us, with absolutely no doubt, a characteristic that you should never look away from when choosing a player. This isn’t where you should start the player selection, do this at the point where you already have a shortlist, so this works as an influential eliminatory factor. Avoid low/low work rates or high/high on players of low stamina. Low offensive work rates on attackers or defensive work rates on defenders are usually bad choices. According to your tactic, playing style, and the players you already have, you should manage work rates for one to compensate for the other. For example, two centre-backs with low defending work rates are unacceptable, but it’s okay to have just one.

Price


Well then, shouldn’t this be one of the first criteria? Good question, but we’re already counting that you left Mbappé out because you know you don’t have enough coins for him. What we’re going to do now is the opposite. Instead of choosing the cheapest players, we’ll choose the most expensive ones. Are you confused? We’ll explain.

By this part of the article, we suppose you already have a pretty good idea of who you want for your squad. In the worst scenario, you’re striving to choose one between two players. Which one should you choose? You probably have a favorite, but you need the final word. Something that will help you decide at a bigger consciousness. Have you searched for someone else’s opinion of experience, hoping to know if he’s really what you’re looking for? That’s no good. This isn’t the right thing to do.

We have nothing against other people’s opinions, but basing your choice on two or three opinions is letting someone else decide for you. You have to ask for thousands or millions of people’s opinions. And how do you do that? Well, exactly: it goes by the price. It’s in the title, after all.

There’s no room for mistakes in a universe so big as the Ultimate Team players. The immensity of good ones easily absorbs bad decisions. The community isn’t stupid and puts a lot of time into a game that, excuse redundancy, learns to learn. There’s no better way to show how good a player is than setting a price as high as his quality. Nobody likes paying more for a player they think isn’t worth anything, and only some manage to pay less than his average price. In other words: are you undecided between two players? Go for the one that costs more.

Before you present any arguments to contradict this strategy, let us list a few exceptions to this rule that you’re about to know of:

  • What about the rest?
    So you choose the most expensive one, and it’s all settled? This isn’t what we said. For some reason, this is the fourth criterion. Until you get here, you’ve at least looked at the players’ attributes and selected those that best fit your playing style and formation. This is just a tiebreaker factor that will certainly work for most people. The more similar the players are to each other, the higher this strategy’s success rate will be.

  • But don’t prices change?
    Of course, they do. Sometimes players who used to be more expensive become cheaper than their concurrent. If you look closely, this happens only once in the game, except for rare situations in which a player will make the difference in real life. In the end, this is proof that the community is alert. What happens is that when the game is released, prices are according to people’s initial expectations. Only after some learning and experimenting time will prices be set for more or less, according to whether the player has been revealed worse or better than expected. For that reason, you should only look at the players’ prices as a choice factor after the first 15 days of the game.

  • And doesn’t supply affect the price?
    Yes, this is also a factor to be taken into account. Prices are made by the community but are also defined by EA, which can put more or fewer player cards in circulation. Suppose they put many cards the price drops.

  • What about popularity?
    All the calling of attention we did until here is important because none of these devices will lead you to a mistake. However, it would help if you intensified your attention when comparing two different popular players. That one of them is in form or plays at a highlighted club is enough to make his price rise. Due to the quick sell value difference between rare and non-rare cards, the last ones tend to get devaluated even when it comes to interesting players. It goes the same way as the popularity factor we explained earlier. If you can identify all these things, you’ll be able to choose the best players at lower prices.

Along with this guide, we gave you all the tools you need to analyze the best choices for your squad. However, the intention wasn’t to depreciate the fun way of finding out if a player is good or not: testing him out. So play, have fun, and if you have good results with someone, don’t change just because somebody else thinks differently. After all, you don’t change a team that’s winning.