 Hey guys, it's Nate, AKA The Foot Accountant. Welcome back to the channel. FIFA 22 was a year of a lot of crazy things, and what I wanna do today in the video is take a look back on this year of FIFA 22 and kinda talk about what we learned from this game and especially in three key areas. There was a lot of unexpected things that happened this year, especially with the market, with leaks and with the content and the power curve, even gameplay and rewards. So we're gonna take a look at all that in today's video. I think it's really crucial to help us to start to think about FIFA 23 and what to expect with the new game is kinda to look back on what happened this past year and learn from it and remember that, especially into the early game of FIFA 23. It is coming very soon. So if you're excited and ready for FIFA 23, hit the thumbs up on the video and subscribe if you're new. Let's start from the top with reason number one, thing number one that changed this year a lot and that was the market. Of course, you guys remember and you notice the difference from year over year, especially from FIFA 21 into FIFA 22, prices dropped considerably on all sorts of cards. Now it's weird in this late stage of FIFA 22 to be thinking about gold cards, right? When we've got Team of the Seasons and all these other crazy cards that are out, but gold cards at the beginning of FIFA lost so much value. There was basically so much more supply on the market this year and that is one of the reasons why literally everything on FIFA was way cheaper this year and I think it was a pretty enjoyable user experience now that we're at the end of it. At the beginning of the year, it sucked and it was terrible because we were all losing coins, everybody was still disappointed and frustrated early on in the year because cards dropped off of cliffs after the first couple of, honestly, weeks into the game. Cards didn't even start off as expensive last year as they did in previous years. I mean, take a look at, I don't know why this De Bruyne is showing as silver but at gold De Bruyne, at the start of FIFA 22, he was around 175,000 coins and at the start of FIFA 21 with the exact same stats on the exact same card, this Kevin De Bruyne card was 380,000 coins. There's so many examples of this from FIFA 21 to FIFA 22 where everything was so much cheaper in 22. Not only that, but take a look at some of these cards and how fast their prices just dropped off during the year. Ronaldo started at 1.7 million coins being a new transfer to Manchester United with a lot of hype in the Premier League. He started off in FIFA 21 around the same amount, 1.7, 1.8 mil but by the time we hit May 1st, he was still 300,000 coins in FIFA 21. This year on May 1st, 70K. And just look at how fast. By the time we get to December, he has gone down from 1.7 mil all the way to 600K. It is just crazy how fast the market dropped off this year on all levels. The cards that went out of packs that were in forms were quickly replaced with all of these brand new promos that we had, like the first year of versus ICE, the first year of the Winter Wild Cards promo, even earlier than that. We had road to the knockouts, we had the numbers up promo, we had rule breakers coming back again. All of these promos coming out consistently week after week after week, just dropped the market so much because there were so many new cards coming out that people could level up with. And we'll talk about the power curve here in a second. But again, just with the market in general, apart from so many new cards coming out, the supply was just crazier this year. And I know that I can speak for myself very honestly and say that FIFA 22 was the best year of pack luck I have ever had. Now, does all of the supply on the market have to do with the preview packs? No, I think that the preview packs are a reason. Being able to open a 7.5K pack every day, if you think about over the course of the year, we probably didn't remember to open a preview pack every single day. But think about how many times you actually profited from it. Not a ton, but sometimes, right? Maybe like once a month, once every couple of weeks, you would make enough coins off a preview pack to buy that pack, sell the contents in it and be ahead. Well, I think a lot of people this year in general just bought these packs in any way and they had better pack luck in general and that's why you saw prices just drop off this year as much as you did. And I think that also transfers into the general pack weight. Here's my best example of, again, how pack weight was really, really good in FIFA 22 compared to previous years. Think about team of the year. I remember even being gone for the first week of team of the year, but seeing all of the insane amount of pack pulls, like it used to be, you opened hundreds and hundreds of packs and then upgrade packs to try to get one or two team of the years, like FIFA 21, FIFA 20. This year in FIFA 22, it was so easy to pack team of the years in relation to how it was in years past. I mean, I know people that were opening those upgrade packs during the first couple of days after the full team was re-released or released in packs. You know, so many people had a Kimi. So many people were packing the KDBs. The Kante was still really, really rare to pack, but messy and all the other cards that were in team of the year, Marquinhos, Rubendillas, Don Aruma, they were so much easier to pack than in years past. And I think that was one thing that EA decided from the beginning of FIFA 22, they wanted to change. They wanted to make the market cheaper. They wanted to make it more market friendly for casuals. And I think that's why they increased the pack weight and that's why prices were cheaper. That's definitely part of the equation. But that's the general thing, right? The market was just cheaper, literally everywhere from meta cards throughout the year and prices maintained themselves on player cards way less during the year because people had more and more cards to upgrade to. Now the last point that I have on this is another talk about, I guess, a little bit of pack supply. We had more rewards in FIFA 22 than ever. Not only do we have division rivals, squad battles and footchamps, we had footchamps qualifier rewards, which you get every single week that you wanna qualify for footchamps, of course, since you have to play footchamps qualifiers and the playoffs, right? Those are always tradable rewards. Now that they're that insane, but with that new system, think about how many more tradable packs EA was giving out weekly on the game in FIFA 22. That's gonna carry forward into FIFA 23 as well. So remember last year when we were all surprised about how the market dropped off so much in the first couple of weeks, maybe the first month in FIFA 22. Well, this year, I don't think we're gonna be surprised because I think EA's gonna keep it the exact same way because I feel like they had a lot of success, especially with the casuals in FIFA 22 with how the market was. So let me know down in the comments what you think about this. If you agree, if you disagree, but I really feel like that was a key aspect of FIFA 22 that was a huge, huge change. And honestly, I don't mind it. I don't hate it. There were still like the very upper tier, upper echelon cards that were expensive, you know, like your icon cards at the beginning of the game, like your mid and base play were very expensive because they were still super sought after and super rare, but also a lot of the cards that most people were using were a lot cheaper. So again, let me know your comments down below. Second thing I wanna talk about, and you know, early in the year in FIFA 22, we had no idea that leaks were going to be as big of a thing as they were. Leaks changed FIFA 22. And honestly, FIFA going forward entirely. And they're probably, it's even a bigger change than the market because the leaks impacted the market so much this year. Leaks have run the market more than ever. And if I, you know, jog your memory a little bit here, it's kind of interesting to remember and to note that a lot of the leaks, you see, remember Foot Sheriff who we get a lot of these leaks from, he joined Twitter in December of 2021. It was like November, December timeframe when the leaks really, really, really started coming to be super normal and super legit. And you know, every single SBC and every single player that we were getting on a promo Friday was leaks ahead of time basically since December, 2021. So we're going on 10 months now with leaks being super consistent, super accurate. Of course, you do have your times where the leaks were not accurate. Everybody remembers this tweet. This is gonna go down as one of the most famous tweets or infamous tweets maybe during FIFA 22. When this mid R9 SBC was leaked and then it didn't drop. But the leaks this year changed literally everything for the market as well because everybody was basing, you know, their moves or their investments, making coins off of leaks, buying SBC fodder based off of the leaks that we would see. Oh my goodness, there's like this, you know, hero upgrade or icon SBC is added to come, you know, a certain player SBC is added to come go buy fodder, ride fodder goes, you know, soaring up in price off of one leak and then the SBC comes out and it doesn't go that much higher depending on what SBC it is. So that was one other, I guess you could say, aspect of the market this year that changed but it changes so many things, right? When a card gets leaked, like we have, even if it's a promo card, a foot birthday Ronaldo gets leaked. Some of Ronaldo's other special cards immediately start to drop or even in a current timeframe, you have a red Charleston SBC that comes out. Some of your other primarily strikers would drop or if for Charleston had other tradable cards on the market, those cards would drop after the leak of the SBC. So that was another way in FIFA 22 where the market changed and it kind of just left you, it kind of just gave you that mindset even more so of like, oh my goodness, I can't hold onto cards very much for very long times because they might just all of a sudden drop in value so much that I'm gonna lose so many coins because a leak might come out or an SBC might be released or a new promo card could get leaked and all of a sudden my card is being sold off and it's dropping incredible amounts of price with the panic selling, right? Panic selling was crazier than ever in FIFA 22 with leaks and with the supply on the market, that combination. Overall, it was just a wildly, wildly insane year on the market in general. Now let's talk future a little bit. Will this change for FIFA 23? Do I think that leaks are going away? Honestly, I don't because a lot of people have had leaked FIFA 23 information already. Leaks have been so consistent during the second half of FIFA 22. I just really don't expect a lot of this to go away. I think that to EA sports, I kind of think about it in my head and compare it to coin transferring, right? Coin transferring is still absolutely a thing. People buy and sell coins on third-party websites that is against EA's terms of service and technically leaks are against EA's terms of service as well if you think about it, right? Because that's information that is supposed to be private and it is supposed to be not released to the public until it's released in the game by EA, right? It's kind of the same thing, but instead of shutting down, they try to shut down the coin buying and stuff with price ranges and banning people and setting up these whatever bots and stuff that they have, EA's bots that they have that try to, you know, the capture stuff that tries to detect when other people are using bots or sniping bots, whatever it may be, like, they don't care enough about that to make it go completely away because they probably could, at least for a temporary fix. I feel like it's the same way with leaks. They're not wanting to put enough effort or maybe it's the money, right? To put enough effort in terms of money to go ahead and try to figure out where these leaks are coming from because think about it, there's so many different ways. I don't know how all these guys get their leaks, but they haven't in with somebody, right? EA hires people to make graphics for them or to make posts for them or there's so many different aspects of people that are involved with making a promo and the rights and everything according, everything that goes on to making a FIFA card, there's a lot, I'm sure, that there's a lot of people involved in the process and so many times along that process line could information be slipped out to somebody. So that's why I think EA has to care enough about it to get rid of the leaks. And as of right now, since they haven't stopped in the past 10 months, I really don't think they're gonna stop in FIFA 23. So just get ready and get expecting for it again because the way that we have been trading and watching the market and kind of learning to be on our toes with leaks and stuff like that and especially if you learn to trade this year with panic selling. Panic selling in FIFA 23 is going to be an absolutely incredible way to make coins with your rare cards, your most popular meta cards. I mean, I think back to some of the greatest trades that I've had during the year, not even with just live cards, but I think back to some of the cards that I've flipped and coins that I've made on just players that are really good cards that people like to use. All of a sudden there's a leak, people start panic selling a card that doesn't really make sense. A card drops 20% in the span of an hour. Okay, that's a lot, right? Okay, after the panic selling and all of a sudden bounces back up 10%, boom. I just made 5% after tax on that sale. That's the kind of thing that I think is gonna be even more prevalent in FIFA 23, especially if you have a combined market for the Xbox and the PlayStation markets, that's gonna be a bit of a change this year as well. And we can think and theorize about how it's gonna be, but we won't actually know until the game is actually out and until that arrives. So leaks in general, of course, we're just such a big aspect this year with the market as well. And I don't think that they're going anywhere. Now, let's talk reason number three of why we need to learn from FIFA 22 and what we learned is the content and the promos, just how fast, and I alluded to this earlier and said that we'd come back to it, just how fast the power curve progressed. And when everybody thinks about the power curve in FIFA, it's basically what that means is we get the cards at the beginning that are like gold cards, right? And then as we go on through the year, we get the promos, we get the specials. This year, it felt like by the time we got to the middle of the year, the power curve was like already where it usually is in like March. Like these cards almost looked like foot birthday-esque when they first came out. You guys remember Winter Wild Cards, right? Arguably is gonna go down as a top, I'm gonna say top three, FIFA promo ever in the history of FIFA. I mean, think about FIFA 22. People are naming this as their top promo ever. You know, you've got some really great promos from other FIFAs, but this one with the swaps program, that's another piece of content, right? Winter Wild Cards is when we saw one of the first swaps programs return and especially with the insane rewards that we had. I mean, think about it, we had an 85 times 10 pack. There was a pack that we had only seen in FIFA 21 at the very end of the year. We had an 85 times 10 that you could get from objectives in December for these Winter Wild Cards. That's insane, right? That's just crazy. So the content this year in the power curve, I think it went way faster than what we were used to. We had cards that were looking way more insane stat wise than we thought we were actually gonna. I mean, look at this Morales. 91 paced, 90 dribbling, 90 shooting in December and he was only 70,000 coins late December, early January, that's crazy. The value and the skill and the stats on these cards that you could get for the price was just astounding this year. And I think that's one thing that people weren't that happy about, but others were like, wow, this is crazy awesome. Like let me keep upgrading my team and getting these insane cards. And then again, like I'm mentioning on the other hand, people were like, okay, this is going way too fast. These cards are way too good. And I think some people think and remember that after Winter Wild Cards, and especially after Team of the Year, it felt like a bit of a lull. I mean, like the power curve kind of didn't move up too much until like Team of the Season, maybe Foot Fantasy. Yeah, Foot Fantasy was a pretty big jump in the power curve, let's be honest, because you look at these stats and their Team of the Season level stats on these cards. So, but you know, the power curve is always gonna be a point in the topic of conversation. But I think the way that EA did it this past year in FIFA 22, I know I'm saying this a lot, but I think EA just found a lot of success in FIFA 22 with how they got people to latch on to trying out brand new cards all the time. And that's just gonna make them release more and more cards throughout the year in FIFA 23 as well. I mean, every single year we look at the content and we're like, man, how can this get better? They're gonna find a way in FIFA 23. And I think it's more related to releasing more promos and continuing to make that power curve progression really, really fast. And just, you know, like the swaps programs, we didn't really expect that. I didn't expect swaps programs to make this big of an appearance in FIFA 22. I mean, if a promo didn't have a swaps program, it became an L promo right off the bat. I mean, think about it, right? Winter Wild Cards set the precedence. After that we had, I mean, what other swaps programs did we have? We had Winter Wild Cards that was a huge one. I don't think we had one during Headliners. I don't remember that. You know, future stars, we had swaps programs. Everybody was about that, right? I don't remember foot birthday, but yeah, we definitely had a swaps program during foot birthday. Then of course, you know, I feel like since the rest of the year, there's only been a couple of weeks off where we haven't had a swaps program, especially during the summertime, right? You think about the footy stuff that was going on, you know, shapeshifters. We had swaps programs a lot at the end of the year. And I think EA had multiple reasons for doing that, but that was one of the biggest changes. And with those programs just came even bigger and better SBCs. And I'm looking through some of these old SBCs that we had from during the year. We just had crazier SBCs way earlier on. Like I mentioned, the 85 times 10, the Foot Hero Upgrade Pack, the first one we had was like really early on. Those were brand new cards, the FIFA and 22 as well. Speak of upgrade packs as well. Gone are the days where you're like waiting for upgrade packs to be released, right? During Ones to Watch, we had a repeatable 78 plus upgrade pack during like literally week one and week two. 78 plus upgrade. At the same time with the Anderson Talisk, literally week one, the first promo of the year, we had upgrade packs. That's not gonna change in FIFA 23 as well. EA wanna give you options to where you can drain your club of coins so that you go spend some more FIFA points. Get used to that, right? So, you know, other SBCs that we had this year for the first time, gear and review player picks. That was a brand new one. You know, the Foot Hero Upgrades, of course, with Foot Hero cards being brand new. I will say, I was a little bit bummed with Icon SBCs this year. Early on, they were okay, but especially as we got into the late game, the Icon Upgrade packs were not good. They were behind the times, especially as the power curve continued to increase. I feel like that was a common theme with Icons this year in general, is that Icons were just behind the power curve in general a lot. But 85 plus upgrade packs, you know, during a team of the group stage or whatever this is, like so many player SBCs, you look through here as well. The Pulisic Fire or Ice, that was a big one. Vinny Jr. Player of the Month. Get ready for more Player of the Months this year. You know, Mertens was a good SBC. So, you know, the content's gonna continue to roll and EA is gonna take it to another level in FIFA 23. And that's why you just had to kind of keep in mind all of the stuff that we're talking about before you get into this next year. Don't expect it to be a FIFA where you can buy Cristiano Ronaldo and hold on to him for two or three months and use his card and expect to only lose 2,300k. I mean, expect to lose probably around like 800k to a mil on a Ronaldo card that you would buy in the first week or even depending on how expensive he is to start the year off this year with how kind of lower these ratings are looking as well as we have a lot of FIFA 23 ratings info coming out pretty soon as well. So, that's a big part of it with the content with the power curve. Now, last thing I wanna speak about as well is all of this game, the menus, the content. Yes, it's cool. Yes, this game is becoming more of a content game but the backbone, the base, just the OG FIFA is the gameplay, right? That's what kind of pulls this all together. It is the backbone of FIFA, right? And EA had a setup this year with gameplay. Like we already mentioned with the reward structure that was really rewarding. It really was because they gave you a goal. They said, hey, you don't get rewards if you only play two games of rivals. It wins. You have to win four games of rivals or eight to get your reward upgrade. Then you have to play a couple of games to try to get some packs for champs, playoffs. That's how you get into the weekend league, right? And weekend league was super easy to get into this year and the rewards were really good. Like almost, not everybody but it was so easy to get good rewards in weekend league. That made the gameplay reward structure really satisfying, especially early on. And I'm gonna say it as well. The gameplay early on was pretty decent. It was a really good year of FIFA gameplay, especially early on because the combination of the reward structure, the gameplay grind, you felt like you were being compensated for the time that you put in with the online game modes, with the change and champs qualifiers. I mean, you may not agree with this and have a bad taste in your mouth of end game FIFA 22 gameplay. But if you think back to the beginning, couple of the motivation and the desire of starting a new FIFA, wanting to get those coins up, wanting to get rewards, couple that with a brand new system where it tells you you have to play a certain number of games per week to get rewards, put those two things together and actually having a pretty solid game, not super crazy, not super buggy, just a decent game. And you had a really high demand for gameplay this year which also affected the market and also affected people in the game. And if you look at EA's numbers, they had a great year themselves as a business and as a company. And I think they just really, I'm not trying to toot EA's horn here and try to give them props, because EA of course make a lot of mistakes and we don't like some of the things they do as well, but they did a really good job this year of putting out a game that is good and especially with the rewards, getting people to play that game a lot. So that is another thing that I think impacted the market this year in general and impacted the game itself with how much people wanted to grind it. But there was just so much that happened and there's even way more that we could have dove into. I mean, obviously we could talk about the EA mistakes because it's not like they forgot how to make mistakes. They made more mistakes than ever. In FIFA 22, I think that's a very fair assessment to say, but they also did a lot of great things with content and a lot of the stuff that we learned, get ready to see it transferred forward because not often do we see good things that happen in a FIFA fall away in the next year's installment. A lot of times if something is good and it works, they keep it going, right? It's the stuff that is not that great that kind of falls off and it kind of falls by the wayside. So I expect to see a cheat market this year in 23. We're gonna talk about that in the upcoming weeks, but I really wanna hear you guys' comments down below. What did you think if you think, think back on the full year of FIFA 22, right? It's really easy to think about, okay, shapeshifters, footies, all of these really insane cards we've had recently. Think back to the captain's cards. Think back, think back to headliners, signature signings, the Friday promo, flashback, Benzema, road to the final, road to the knockouts, Fakir, all the Bernardo Silva, SBC, some of the really good content early on as well. Kind of think about the whole year in general and drop your comments down below what you really thought of this year in FIFA because I know there's a lot of mixed opinions, but I feel like most people have a decently favorable opinion of this year of FIFA 22, especially in the ultimate team game mode. So again, let me know your comments down below, but if you enjoyed today's video and maybe you got something out of it, hit the thumbs up and of course, subscribe if you're new. A lot of FIFA 23 content coming soon, but first we look back on 22 to see if we can learn and think about heading into FIFA 23. It's been Nate the Foot Accountant, I'll catch you guys later. Peace.