The Team of the Season and FIFA 17 Cards’ Prices

What impact does the Team of the Season have on the FIFA 17 transfer market? When should I buy a player whose card has been upgraded? Do the prices of the IF cards of players who received a TOTS also increase? It would be great to know the answers to all of these and other questions, wouldn’t it? That’s why we’re publishing this guide which analyses the variations of the FIFA 17 Prices according to the Team of the Season. Knowledge is power!

Quick Access

Introduction
Basic Principles
NIF
TOTS

 
 
 
 

Comprehending the FIFA 17 Winter Transfers Prices

Guide’s introductory note
 

In the past three years we have been collecting information on the prices of hundreds of players’ cards, in different stages of the season, including during the Winter Transfers Season. We’ll use them not only in order to predict what is going to happen in FIFA 17, but also to publish other more specific and detailed trading guides.

This series of trading guides we’ve been publishing obeys to a logical sequence. If you haven’t read one of the previous articles, we recommend you do it now. As we have said here before, prices on the FUT market vary according to several factors, like for example the type of card, the player, his real life performance or the release of promotional packs. That’s why it’s impossible to describe with 100% accuracy what is going to happen with the price of a determined card because every case is a different case. What we’re doing here is give you a general idea of the evolution in the average card’s price. It doesn’t mean all cards will behave the same way at some point. We’re talking tendencies only. So now that’s been warned…

Basic Principles

General notions on the way FIFA 17 prices are affected due to the Team of the Season
 

Predicting the price of a card isn’t an easy task. This year it’s even harder. The FUT market has never been so unpredictable as it is now. There is, however, a period of the year when prices can be even more unpredictable: May/June, the TOTS’s months.

We carefully analysed these price variations and were able to come up with some very important conclusions.

Market
The prices of cards in general decrease up until the first TOTS comes out, and then start rising again moments after that. During the releases of the Teams of the Season, prices tend to slightly decrease.

IF Cards
The behaviour of IF cards is similar to the NIF ones’, although the price changes happen more moderately.

TOTS Cards
The UP cards of the most popular players are the ones that go under the most valorisation relatively to the previous cards.

Now that you have an idea of how the FIFA 17 prices vary, it’s time to go deeper.

NIF and Team of the Season Cards

The FIFA 17 price variations due to the Teams of the Season
 

In general, NIF cards lose value as the first TOTS approaches. However, this is only visible on the week before the TOTS, a period in which cards can get price decreases of up to 10%. Naturally, the biggest price drop occurs between the day of the release itself and the day before it. In just 24 hours, cards lose more than 2% of their value. Which means it’s safe to say that a good day to buy your players is the day the TOTS are released.

If we compare the prices of cards along these weeks, we come to the conclusion that there is a pattern: they’re always cheaper on the day new TOTS are being launched. On the other hand, the biggest price increases always occur from the first to the second and third days of each TOTS. However, if Electronic Arts maintain their rule of releasing the best TOTS on Fridays, these fluctuations won’t be too noticeable due to the Weekend League’s reverse effect, which consists of the highest prices appearing on Fridays and the lowest ones on Sunday. Along each week prices remain more or less stable, reacting very little to the midweek Team of the Season.

Week after week, the prices go through slight decreases. They’re not highly affected by the quality of the current Team of the Season. The historical minimum of the game is reached by the time the penultimate TOTS is released, when prices hit values that are only comparable to the day when the first TOTS is released and FIFA 18’s post demo.

The pattern which was previously described for NIF cards is also followed by IF cards, although, percentually, the price increases and decreases are smaller.

The TOTS Cards and the Teams of the Season

Variation of FIFA 17 TOTS cards’ prices
 

Rule number one: every TOTS card hits its historical maximum price on the day it’s launched. Most of the times, the initial price is almost two times higher than the average price for the card on the rest of the year. Prices on the first week are almost always the highest, and they don’t reach such high values again until the end of the season.

During the Team of the Season there are always some fluctuations, although prices naturally tend to decrease over time. The biggest drop is registered already on the first week, a period when the market is still balancing itself, and the second biggest drop occurs on the week after that. From there, prices show an apparent stabilisation, which only becomes definitive at the end of all TOTS. This stability maintains itself until the end of July, when prices increase at about 15% in a period of two to three weeks, then previous behaviour is resumed after the FIFA 18 demo comes out.

There is a broad number of TOTS cards, although this pattern isn’t always followed by all players in exactly the same way. Players from the least popular leagues tend to divert themselves.

About the NIF cards of players who received a TOTS card, the tendency for those who are high rated (a.k.a. more popular) is for their price to increase (about 10%) due to the lack of cards on the market. For the minority of players with lower ratings, the new TOTS ends up causing a reverse effect: since it’s easier to make the upgrade and not many people are interested in the old card, its price decreases.