If your childhood was anything like ours, it was most likely spent recounting the weekend’s Match of the Day highlights in grass-stained replica shirts and having marathon games of footy with your mates down the park. You also probably took part in the important playground matter of football sticker collection, haggling with chums for players you needed and those that you desperately wanted rid of, as the crowds grew in Cola-fuelled excitement like a landmark day at Wall Street.

Ultimate Team is the modern-day equivalent, taking the in-game dynamics of FIFA 09 and adding an enhanced version of a card-based managerial mode first seen in UEFA Champions League 06/07. As you begin Ultimate Team you are given a pack of cards containing a team of unfamiliar players, a stadium, home and away kits and the option to create your own player. But despite your team sheet not being filled with household names, the initial few matches with your band of budget battlers actually provide an incredible amount of fun as you scrap against sides online, opening up chances to improve your fledgling franchise with new cards. New packs of players are acquired using gold coins earned by playing matches or by trading with the community. But unfortunately, you can also buy packs with Microsoft Points, turning Ultimate Team into an unbalanced catastrophe from the very minute it arrived.

There are people out there with too much money on their hands; spoiled rotten kids or overly-competitive adults who lap up the idea of shelling out real money in order to get their hands on the best players, kits and managers right from the get-go. You know the kind from when you were a kid. You saved what you could from your measly allowance and went on a bounding run to the local shop, each step paved in excitement as your mind wandered towards sticker packs filled with the rare and the wanted. You’d peel back the foil on that glorious pack of potential stickery greatness and belt out a roar of approval when you uncovered a ‘shiny’- a club badge or kit, the most in-demand of all the glue-backed paper. Then that kid would turn up, the only-child to a doting, guilt-induced family who would immediately spoil your sense of achievement by turning out three of the exact same card from a probable pile of five hundred ‘doublers’. It made you sick, and all the fun in adding that one little rectangle to your sticker book vanished in an instant. What was the point?

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what it feels like in Ultimate Team. Teams lined up with every player you could possibly want are a common opposition online, and the idea of taking a team of nobodies and slowly crafting a world class squad seems to be more fantastical than the end result. The fault doesn’t entirely lie with EA, but it does bring around memories of their old industry typecast as the company who were happy to milk the average punter for everything it could get. Their greed has contributed to damaging the product, and by recent ways of thinking, it all seems a tad out of character.

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