Click the images to get a better look at them.

Wordfromthewise – Silver Liga BBVA

Aidan – FC Gooners

Chyngyz – EPL 75 Star

Johnpaulluna – ASTORIA FC

Neil – Blitzkrieg

Ole Martin – FK Oslo

Pablo – Inter Milan

Tim M – Irish

Tuome – Spain

Think you’ve got something better? Pop a link in the comments…

To be in with a chance of winning all you need to do is purchase any Gold, Premium Gold or Premium Gold Jumbo Pack, either from the Web app or in game, within the above time frame. Each pack purchased will count as one entry into the competition and you can enter multiple times. If you’re a winner, you’ll be contacted by email from the 24th of February.

Grand Prizes: (Available only to UK Residents)

• Signed Manchester City Shirt, 1 pair of tickets to Man City v Bolton at the Etihad Stadium on March 3rd, 100,000 coins.

• Signed Newcastle Shirt, 1 pair of tickets to Newcastle v Sunderland at the Sports Direct Arena on March 4th, 100,000 coins.

• Signed Chelsea shirt, 1 pair of tickets to Chelsea v Stoke at Stamford Bridge on Mar 10, 100,000 coins.

• Signed Arsenal Shirt, 1 pair of tickets to Arsenal v Newcastle at the Emirates Stadium on March 12th, 100,000 coins.

Secondary Prizes: (Available only to UK Residents)

10 Prizes of 100,000 coins

If you aren’t eligible because of your location, don’t panic. There will also be 10 Prizes of 100,000 coins for FUT players outside of the UK.

For full details, see the announcement on EA.com

Good luck.

It has been a strange time on the Fifa Ultimate Team market, player prices are jumping around everywhere, and what seemed to be good investments, turn into disasters. Everyone has noticed the price drops, it is a huge thing to take in to consideration if you are trying to build your Ultimate Team. I remember back in December, I bought a Neymar for 15,000 (below average market price), hoping that his price would rise. It turned out that his price not only didn’t rise, it plummeted. His average price is now under 9,000 – not a massive loss, but it was totally unexpected. I decided to research this further, and find the reason that player’s prices drop this much half way through the year, here is what I have learnt:

Why player prices have been dropping:

There are a few factors that have contributed to the player prices dropping, the most important probably is the massive increase of people buying packs:

• Increase of Supply:

During the winter period, many more people than normal have opened packs. As every economist will know, an increase in supply, will lead to a decrease in price. Players are becoming less rare and therefore their market price has dropped. Not great for people who have spent lots of money on very high priced players. So if you were someone that bought lots of packs during the winter, it was partly your fault that prices crashed!

• TOTY packs and IF cards:

When an in-form card of a player comes out, understandably people would prefer to have this card instead of the original, because it is better. This in turn means that the original player’s price will drop dramatically. Take Iniesta for example, before TOTY his market price was 250,000 , after this his price dropped to under 200,000 as everyone rushed to the packs to find the higher version. It has since risen slightly, showing that buying players just after their in form version is released can yield high profits.

How will the price drops affect you?

The majority of cards that you have in your club, have dropped in price by at least 5%. The players from TOTY and TOTW however, have increased by an average of 10% since their release, due to people not knowing their market price. If you have any players that have recently had an in form version released, their prices will drop.

It is extremely hard to predict whether your card will drop in price, perhaps the only way is by watching the trends on Ultimatedb.nl. You may be annoyed, but remember back to Fifa 11 where this all happened at almost the exact same time of the year. Perhaps the prices even dropped by less, I can remember really struggling to even sell players, because they had become almost worthless.

How can you maximise your profits?

The drop in prices will affect players with less money more than those with more. If you have little money, you will find it hard to start trading and making profits, as prices are all over the price. If you have lots of money however, you can take advantage of the price fluctuations, and cash in on players when their prices peak. Always check the player prices before you sell, this will ensure that you are not being ripped off.

• Buy low, sell high.

Obvious really, but I see many people ignoring it. It is easy to sell players cheap, but that will not do you any favours, wait until their price rise.

• Buy in form players as soon as they are released.

Their prices are proven to rise by alot after they are released. If you get a player for 60,000 just as they are released, it is likely that their price will be around 80,000 in about a week. Buy as many of them as you can, if you can afford it, you may just get lucky and rake in 100,000′s of coins.

• Buy regular players when IF’s have been released.

As you will have learnt, player prices drop after an IF card has been released. It is likely that their price will increase later on. Remember that you need to buy the players after their prices have dropped, buying before the drop would be plain silly! If you see the player’s prices rising slowly after a drop, this is also a good time to buy, there is no better way to make profits than buying when a player’s price is rising!

You can follow FIFA Monster on Twitter, and visit the site at FIFAMonster.com

The first batch of January Transfers contains some fairly high profile names and Arsenal fans are sure to be pleased with the inclusion of a certain French, god-like figure.

FUT Transfers – January 17th

Landon Donovan: From Los Angeles Galaxy to Everton

José Antonio Reyes Calderón: From Atlético de Madrid to Sevilla FC

Thierry Henry: From New York Red Bulls to Arsenal

Maxwell Scherer Cabelino Andrade: From FC Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain

Chinedu Obasi: From 1899 Hoffenheim to FC Schalke 04

Robbie Keane: Los Angeles Galaxy to Aston Villa

Ludovic Obraniak: From LOSC Lille to Girondins de Bordeaux

Aliaksandr Hleb: VfL Wolfsburg to FC Barcelona

Hanno Balitsch: From Bayer 04 Leverkusen to FC Nürnberg

Gylfi Sigurðsson: From 1899 Hoffenheim to Swansea City

Yohan Mollo: From Granada CF to AS Nancy

Gaël Kakuta: From Bolton Wanderers to Dijon Football

Thomas Kahlenberg: From VfL Wolfsburg to Évian Thonon Gaillard FC

Moustapha Bayal Sall: From AS Saint-Etienne to AS Nancy

Jan Morávek: From FC Schalke 04 to FC Augsburg

Federico Macheda: From Manchester United to Queens Park Rangers

Carlos Reina Aranda: From Levante UD to Real Zaragoza

Emmanuel Frimpong: From Arsenal to Wolverhampton Wanderers

Patrick van Aanholt: From Wigan Athletic to Chelsea

Nicolai Jørgensen: From Bayer 04 Leverkusen to FC Kaiserslautern

Joshua King: From Borussia M’gladbach to Manchester United

Tolga Cigerci: From VfL Wolfsburg to Borussia M’gladbach

More transfers will be added to FIFA 12 Ultimate Team over the next few weeks and you can keep up to date with all of them by repeatedly checking this forum thread, created by Romily Broad.

The in-form player OVR’s are predictably insane so if you’ve got coins spare, you could probably fund a small county with the proceeds returned from selling one these guys. Good luck.

FUT: Team of the Year: The Forwards

96 – Ronaldo, 98 – Messi, 95 – Rooney

If your lucks in and you do find one of these guys in a pack, hit the comments and let us know.

To start you off, here’s my Brazilian Squad again:

And here’s Daves Bronze MLS Squad:

You can click the images to enlarge and get a better look.

To share your team just log into the web app, click share on the left hand side, the copy the link and paste it in the comments, along with your inspiration for the team. We’ll update the post with the best ones.

With FIFA Street news tailing off, at least until we play it, and the recent TOTY announcements, all the FIFA buzz is currently centred around FUT. A recent Twitter conversation with European Community Manager Al Reid led to me writing this for EASF. I’m pretty new to FUT so this was basically a bit of an experiment that turned into a post. I figured I’d repost it here in full.

FIFA Ultimate Team has been a part of FIFA since FIFA 09, and has grown to become a massive part of the game, for some being the only mode they play. I’m guilty of never really trying it up until now because whilst I liked the idea of crafting my own team I honestly didn’t like the card system  and was looking for a more authentic experience, so I’ve stuck to playing Manager/Career Mode.

That said, I have dabbled and created an Ultimate Team each year, but I’ve never really done anything beyond opening the free packs you get and playing the odd match here and there. I’d never tried to understand the mechanics of what makes a good team and never really applied any thought to trying to achieve a good level of team chemistry. They say pictures speak a thousand words, so here is my FUT Generations Squad, untouched from when I last tinkered with it.

I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s a bit of a mess and the only reason the chemistry isn’t lower is because I unwittingly managed to cobble together some sort of French connection on the right hand side. I present it only as evidence that I really didn’t know what i was doing.

My current Squad looks like this:

Although those two teams are worlds apart, getting my head around UT and  the importance of organisation and structure was actually pretty straightforward. There are excellent examples out there, made by hardcore FUT players, aimed at gaming the markets to maximise profit, hoarding cards to artificially inflate values and so on with the express intent of earning massive amounts of coins to spend. I’m sure they work, but I didn’t use any of those methods. I just used my free monthly packs that come from redeeming the code in the Special Edition of FIFA 12 and some patience.

I’m not claiming to know very much (or anything at all really) about FUT and any Ultimate Team veteran reading this will probably roll their eyes, but I’m writing this to show you that you can genuinely create a decent team with no outlay, even with no FUT experience, if you just take the time to look around.

The hardest part was deciding what type of team to actually build. The options available are near endless, and will affect what tournaments you’re able to enter once you’re finished. I’ve heard of people building squads of only left footed players, or bronze squads that are so finely balanced they can take on anything in their path, really creative stuff, but as you can see, I’ve gone for a fairly standard Gold Squad, all Brazilian nationals, all with 4-4-2 as a preffered formation.

In my January set of free packs I picked up a few Brazilian players, which was when this team began to take shape. I already had a fairly strong Brazilian prescense in the squad through sheer luck and decided to start looking at what their preffered formations were. 4-4-2  was the most popular and so that was that. I set about building the best Gold, Brazilian, 4-4-2 team I could with the resources I had available, which was basically what I’d already got from my free packs and daily gift promotions.

Once I’d decided what I was trying to achieve, the first thing I did was start stripping out players that didn’t meet my criteria. I moved all non brazilian players I had into my trade pile, which was where I hit my first hurdle. I had no idea what any of them were worth.

A look at the markets helped, but don’t provide anything concrete. I started them off at what I thought were fair prices but they wouldn’t sell, leading me to gradually reduce the prices to shift them. I preffered to stick to short auctions, as I found they weren’t getting any interest until the last few minutes anyway. Once I did that, I started shifting players a lot faster. For the most part I did fairly well but some people definitely picked up some bargains in my desperation to offload players and raise coins for my squad.

Whilst the auctions were ticking over I hit the markets and simply used the search criteria tools to narrow down to what I was looking for. The prices surprised me, with large fluctuations in price for the exact same card, literally seconds apart. I’d previously thought that prices would be almost rigid, but if you search narrowly  and at the right times, the bargains you’ll pick up are staggering. I worked my way through the team, upgrading one position at a time, dropping lower qualty players onto the bench and the players they replaced into the trade pile. The main thing I picked up pretty quickly was not being afraid to back out of an auction, no matter how much you want the player. If it starts getting too pricey, remove it from your watch list and search again, you can be sure that ten more of that card will turn up within minutes and if you’re prepared to juggle auctions and resell duplicates, you’ll get some great players for next to nothing.

The total cost for the entire squad was £78,250. £23,250 of that was spent on my last purchase, Maicon. As much as I was trying to do this on the cheap, my hand was forced. There are only 2 Brazilian RBs who fit into a 4-4-2 team and are rated over 80, Maicon and Alves. Alves was completely out of the question simply because of the expense. Maicon on the other hand tends to range between 25-30,000 so I managed to get a slight deal on him. He is still far and away my most expensive player though and even with his inclusion, the total cost of the entire squad is still less than the buy now price of most Alves cards.

There are some improvements that could be made, certain positions do have better players in that bracket available, but I’m pretty pleased with what I’ve done in just over a day and without getting into the “silly money” realm of UT. Now that I know how simply and quickly a squad can be built, I’m going to play a few tournaments and put the profit towards another squad, perhaps something a little trickier like a Bronze Championship squad.

FUT: Team of the Year – The Midfield

96 – Iniesta, 91 – Alonso, 97 – Xavi

A talented bunch I’m sure you’ll agree but Alonso, really? Questionable one that for us so who would you have along side Barcelona’s finest instead?

The final batch of Ultimate Team TOTY players should be with us on Friday and then the scramble for Messi, Rooney and Ronaldo begins. God help us all.

It covers topics like the importance of chemistry and how to increase it, what certain card icons mean, what Happy Hour is and so on. If you’re an Ultimate Team vet then this isn’t for you, but if you’ve been thinking about trying UT then this is a great place to start. You can read the Q and A in full on EA.com and check out FifaRalles latest Video from the FIFA Street/Ultimate Team Hybrid series below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The announcement comes on the back of the huge news that new EA poster boy Messi has just been awarded the Ballon D’or 2011 and if you plan to stop him in FIFA 12, you’re going to need a few of these defensive maestros.

FUT: Team of the Year – The Defence

93-Casillas

91-Alves, 93-Pique, 94-Vidic and 91-Ramos

So do you agree with the first batch of FUT: Team of the Year players and if not, who would you have chosen instead?

We’re expecting the midfielders to be released on Wednesday, so keep your eyes peeled. Until then, the defence is already live in UT,  happy hunting.