 Hey guys, it's Nate, A.K. The Foot Accountant. Welcome back to the channel. We're doing something a little bit different today. We're gonna take a look back in time at this whole past year of FIFA 21 and take a look at some things that we learned from the content that EA released this year, how they went bigger and better than ever, but also what they kind of did in doing that and just kind of how it made us react to the game and what now we expect out of the game and how we can learn from that heading into FIFA 22. There was some big changes in FIFA 21. The content was again, bigger and better than ever and I think that's gonna continue into 22, but in some specific areas, I think that will shine through just like it did inside of FIFA 21. So let's take a look back because actually one year ago, I posted a video similar to this one talking about the changes that I expected and what we learned from FIFA 20 into FIFA 21. I talked a lot about upgrade pack SBCs, guaranteed pack SBCs like the party bag. At the end of FIFA 20, EA started releasing all these party bags and people fell in love with them. And that is again, something that we learned this year in FIFA 21 is that the party bag SBC, the gamble packs, people absolutely freaking love those. So again, there was a lot of stuff that we expected to see in FIFA 21 and it actually came true. In this video, I talked about SBC player prices. You see me here talking about fluctuations on this graph of an 83 rated card and how 83s were so cheap in FIFA 20 and then you look at 83s this year like man, SBC fodder was more expensive as a whole. So we're going to talk all about this kind of stuff today. I think what we're going to start off with though is we're going to talk about SBCs, right? We're going to talk about SBCs, player SBCs packs, then move into objectives and then move into the market. So SBCs, which by the way, at the beginning of FIFA 21, I don't know why EA did this and they're changing it for 22, but they made the SBC tab way too hard to find. Obviously you figured out where it was after a little bit on the menus, but they made SBCs way too hard to find for the casual FIFA user, right? I think that goes untalked about or did at the beginning of the year last year. It was way too hard to find SBC section. So just looking at all the SBCs we've had this year, right? Of course we're in footies, we have insane content going on right now, but all year long, we had just a big improvement in the number of player SBCs. Now obviously not everything was great value, not everything was an SBC that you wanted to do and you had to do, right? But if you take a look back at some of the most popular players in FIFA Ultimate Team last year, take a look at some of these most upvoted players on footbin, right? SBC, SBC, SBC, look at all these cards in here that are SBCs, a couple of objectives thrown in here, but Neres, Coutinho, Joao Felix player of the month, a legendary card in FIFA 20, the first SBC at all, Tavernier, Elshah's Flashback, Kleiber, right? Renato Sanchez foot birthday, Arhen Robin, Arturo Verlal foot birthday, some of the most favorite and some of the most popular cards from FIFA 21 were SBCs and a couple very, I guess, legendary and historic SBCs to point out, this is the first one, right? The first ever Ronaldo, Christian Ronaldo got his first ever SBC this past year. I know that a lot of people didn't like it because it was lower rated than his gold card, but it was the cheapest Ronaldo until his gold card got so cheap at the end of the game this year, but it was basically the cheapest Ronaldo you're ever gonna get in like, what, was this January? The end of January when this came out, 300K for this Ronaldo when his gold card was still like 900,000 coins. So again, this was one SBC that I think of this year in FIFA 21, where EA just kind of upped their game and basically now when it comes to player SBCs, there's nothing that feels like restricted, right? There's, we got a moments R9 SBC this year, although it seems very late that basically there's nothing that EA now seems that they can't do with SBCs. There's no like, oh, that's impossible because they'll never do a 99 rated messy SBC with five sort of skills. Well, here it is, right? I think those are some of the things that we didn't expect in FIFA 21 that we weren't used to where EA kind of again, just raised the bar to another level and gave us some of those crazy SBCs we never thought we'd see. 98 Ramos with these kind of stats, like that's crazy in its own right. So all the skill move upgrades, all the weak foot upgrades that we saw this year, that was big and just the number of players available through SBC that were so good in this game of FIFA 21, that was where a place where EA took player SBCs to the next level. But speaking of SBCs, I think the biggest jump in content and the biggest, I guess, improvement or just the way that EA structured the game is since they knew that people loved those party bags from the end of FIFA 20 when we had those party bags releasing during the summer heat and pre-season promos. You think back to almost every single promo in FIFA 21, there was a lot of guaranteed packs or party bag SBCs, the gamble SBCs we call them, and upgrade packs, right? That was something in FIFA 20 we were like, man, we want upgrade packs way more often. Every single promo this year, if you think back, I mean, maybe not for once to watch or rule breakers at the beginning of the year, but we had upgrade packs for almost every single promotion in FIFA 21, almost every single time. There were upgrade packs out all year, and that's, again, EA is just kind of fostering this environment of packs, packs, packs, gamble packs, upgrade packs. You have the potential to pack X card because it's in, you know, as a part of this promo right now, you might be able to get them from a pack. And again, not just upgrade packs, but FIFA 21 is also gonna go down in history as the year of the player pick, because before FIFA 21 this year, player picks were really not that exciting, right? FIFA 20, I think we had a couple of them, and they were cool, but they just weren't that great, right? Everybody in FIFA 20 loved this 81 plus double upgrade SBC, and, you know, those aren't even popular anymore. It's all about the player picks, right? So that's one thing, like the 81 plus player pick is gonna be a legendary SBC, but even icon player picks as well, right? We had so many icon player pick SBCs released this year, and that's just my next point, is that the sheer number of upgrade packs and like SBCs that give you a pack, not a player, but a pack, just so many, the whole ceiling again was raised on just the type of packs we thought we could ever see in FIFA 21, like rating specific packs, position, defender, midfielder, or attacker specific packs, right? Upgrade packs, like some of this 91 plus times five, like that's crazy, right? They were getting packs like this, albeit towards the end of the game, but we have had upgrade packs and the guaranteed party bags and stuff like that, and even some of the icon swaps packs, right? I don't exactly remember if these are new to this year, but I mean, these really became popular this year. The 81 times 25, the 83 times 25, the 84 times 20, it was just a year where we had so many new kinds of packs, especially with when it comes to icons, the icon player pick, right? We'll talk about this when we speak about the market, the mid icon player pick, the first one that was ever released as an icon upgrade player pick in March, I will never forget what that did to the market because that was the single, like biggest rise in SBC fodder in a short time from a thing we've ever seen. So we'll talk about that a little more, but just again, just the crazy amount of packs that we had through swaps, even just adding stuff to the code, right? Take a look at some of this old foot watch code from during the year. People loved these gamble packs, right? And I think that's just gonna continue in FIFA 22. EA is gonna realize, hey, we can put packs like this out almost all the time. It's gonna cost people to panic sell their stuff. It's gonna cost people to lose coins and also spend FIFA points to do these packs to get coins so that they can have a chance, right? It's the gamble aspect here that is really taking off even more. So I just wanted to point that out. And also again, even not just with icon packs, but just the sheer number of different packs, right? 81 plus times seven, 81 plus times three. I know that we have preview packs looking like it's gonna be in FIFA 22. That was a new addition later on in the year. So that added a lot of different new types of packs that we've never seen before. But also just throughout the year before preview packs happened, just the sheer amount of different types of packs that we saw was insane. And also one thing I wanna point out is with this kind of like pack addiction, right? In the menus and stuff, I just think back to like with upgrade packs being available at all times, like EA is just fostering this gambling environment so much. And I know that people don't like that about the game and there's a lot of lawsuits against EA and that's why we think preview packs are becoming a thing. But that, I mean preview packs in my opinion are really just gonna make people end up spending more FIFA points on the game. Especially if you think about it in the early part of the game, people don't have many coins, they wanna save those coins, coins are precious early on, right? So they're gonna put on maybe if they pack something sick from a 25K pack, they might chuck on five, 10 bucks to FIFA points so they can buy that pack and not have to spend their coins on it. So stuff like that I think is still gonna be a big thing in FIFA 22 and they're probably gonna take this to the next level as well, which I'm excited to see it's gonna be dope, but also from a market perspective, it's gonna be very interesting. So that's what I wanted to talk about with packs, the guaranteed packs, the party bag and just like the gamble aspect of this stuff and the player picks as well, changed the way we see packs and we see content and our bar, our expectations for content in FIFA 22 has never been higher because of how much they raised the bar in FIFA 21. So that's enough about SPC's and packs. Let me know in the comments what you think about all that stuff. Of course, there's gonna be some things that I forget in this video because there's just again, a sheer amount of content that was released last year. The sheer amount is just insane. So I'm gonna forget a few small things here and there, but if you're thinking of anything, definitely drop it down below in the comments. I think that objectives in FIFA 21 also took off to new heights that we had honestly never seen before. Honestly, this went under the radar, but the silver stars and the silver beasts, that my only problem with this is that we didn't have a game mode to use the silvers in that like gave decent rewards but you didn't have much motivation to use the silver stars for most of the year. I know right now we have silver weakening plus, but it's basically the end of August and I'm recording this. So like that's kind of dead and gone, right? So I love silver stars though. I love the idea and just the amount of packs and the amount of content that was in objectives this year was pretty nuts. If you think about it, every single promo that we had on a Friday, we were getting objective cards, right? Think about like team of the year. We got the, or future stars. We had that club 80, Hulet Gang, Tonali, right? We had so many objective cards that were released throughout the whole entire year that it was so easy in FIFA 21 to have an untradable team. It was easier than ever with the amount of cards that were available through objectives, weekly stuff, through milestones, right? I think back to some of the milestones early on, the league specific ones, we had Prem, we had Serie A, we had La Liga, Ligon. And no, there were some great cards that were available through the squad foundations and through the milestones tab, right? It was just such a grindable year of FIFA. If you didn't want to spend money on the game and you didn't want to try to take a risk with packs, you could spend some time doing the new friendlies modes, playing and getting objectives done to get these cards in your team. So I just think that the quantity of objective content was great. Now, not all of it was easy and fun to do. Like there were some really hard objectives. I think icon swaps, some of the stuff just seems like a pain, but there were some, again, insane improvements from FIFA 20 to FIFA 21 in terms of the objectives. And again, it really comes down to me to the Silver Stars, which was a dub, the amount of packs you could get weekly from just doing like the Silver Beast objective. And then also the player SBCs or the player objectives that would come out basically every Friday. And even some of the packs that you would get through here as well, through milestones, through objectives, even through the foundations tab, season progress, again, this is getting kind of old. Like we need to get some better stuff in here. Just the packs, right? People don't care as much, I think, about some of this stuff. It's just kind of fluff, right? But it is stuff to do, it's stuff to grind for, especially for level 15 or level 30 player. I don't think those were super duper hyped this year. I don't remember any certain level 15 or level 30 players that like ended up being super crazy meta. There were some good ones in there, but it was only kind of worth it to grind for like level 30 if you had a super big, like a love for a card like if you're a huge Leeds fan and you really want to get this Rodrigo or you really want to get this Julian Brand because you're a huge Dortmund fan. Like I felt like the only people that really wanted a storyline card, that was kind of why. But objectives as a whole, big, big improvement from FIFA 20, just the sheer amount of content that was available there was awesome, right? That was awesome. So let's talk about the market. And this is where we're going to spend a little bit more time because the market last year in FIFA 21, we had some of the biggest price drop-offs that we have ever seen, right? We had some of the cheapest cards that we had ever seen, you know, not just with preview packs at the end of the year, like guys like Messi, guys like Mbappe and Neymar with those base gold cards, we saw so much drop-off. And even with like Team The Season cards and promo cards throughout the year, there was just market crashing all the time because EA put out more promo cards than ever in FIFA 21. I mean, take a look at this. I was doing this today, I was like, man, if I want to scroll all the way back down through all the promo teams that we have had, I know that Tots takes up a lot of time and a lot of space, but like, we had a promo almost every single Friday, right? And in terms of market content and in terms of cards that are in this game and that sort of content, there were very few Fridays where we didn't have a promo in FIFA. We had some new promos this year, like Foot Freeze, the What If promo was a brand new one. And, you know, they're already starting off FIFA 22 with new aspects, kind of, you know, doing a What If side to wants to watch and revamping wants to watch a little bit with having those, the win streaks kind of involved with that. But we had more cards than ever this year and I think that's going to continue in 21, right? EA has really just made us crave that Friday content drop, the new cards and packs, all the SBCs, all the objectives. They have just created more of an addiction and a crave for content in this game. And that shows, first thing I want to show you is SBC fodder prices. Lucas Lieva didn't have a single special card this year except for a 90 rated What If card. So he was in packs basically the whole year. That's why I want to use his example, right? We get to the November. We get to November. Let's compare FIFA 20 and FIFA 21 for the same rated 84 Lucas Lieva. This card in FIFA 20, he bounced between 4,000 coins and peaked at basically 10K. He was never over 10,000 coins until July, like during summer heat. And when, you know, EA really cranked up the content in FIFA 20 at the end of the year. He never really went over 10,000 coins. He was around, let's say, 5K for most of the year. Take a look at Lucas Lieva inside of FIFA 21. He was chilling at about 3K before SBCs really started to get pumped out. And really, he was chilling around 7 to 9K. From, look at this, from basically November until May, he was never at or around the same prices that he was last year in FIFA 20. SBC fodder was so much more expensive this year on just the general level because of how much content that EA put out. Again, that's why I'm talking about EA raised the bar in terms of SBC content. They just, they released so much more content that it made these cards stay so much higher. Take a look at this, 8K, like through the entire month of January. Last year, during January, how much of this guy? 4K, he had one spike, right? One spike around team of the year with SBCs or whatever that was, maybe future stars as well. But he was like 3, 4,000 coins and they didn't move that much. And this year, it was just insane trading with SBC fodder. So many more people made more coins this year because of trading with fodder because it was so much more in demand. Take a look at this, right? You got right here, you got boom, he's 8,000 coins. He spikes to 10, drops back down to like 7, 8, back up to 10, even in like the earlier parts of the year goes down to four, spikes up to what is 7, 8K, goes back down to four, boom. Spikes back up to 8K, like weekly, right? So there was so much trading that you could do with these cards. And of course we look at this March timeframe, I'm gonna show you another one here, Sergio Busquets. This just goes to show that just fodder was more expensive this year than ever. Like look at this grab, like he started low, rose up in the middle of the year and then of course towards the end of the year with all the packs and stuff like that, you know, team of the season dropping back down a bit. But I mean, look at this peak, 57K, basically 60,000 coins was the peak for the Sergio Busquets 87 rated in FIFA 21. In FIFA 20, he was an 89 rating card. So 87 instead of 89, and the highest this guy got was 67K in FIFA 20. So for most of the year, he was around like 35,000 coins for an 89 rated in FIFA 20. But in FIFA 21, he was basically the same price, two ratings lower. So that just again goes to show that the SBC content this year was insane. And I think that continues. Now the one thing that's gonna be interesting about how that plays out this year is the preview packs, right? It's gonna be very interesting to see how preview packs affects the market. And it's gonna be really hard to predict how that is gonna be because we haven't seen it before. But the number one thing that we know about preview packs, which right now it seems like they've stopped them except for the premium gold and these 5K ones and under in FIFA 21. But what's gonna be really interesting to see and what we know about preview packs is that there's supply. There's tons and tons of supply and that's why we've seen cards drop off a bunch. Meta cards drop off a bunch. When they go back into packs during this footies promo is because preview packs just apply them so freaking much. So I do honestly think that's gonna affect the market a lot inside of FIFA 22. And I think it's just gonna depend on the pack weight from these preview packs, how often they are released inside of the store for, we'll be of course assessing that as it comes but preview packs is gonna be a huge, huge part of the market this year and how prices react because of that. But let's talk about player prices, right? I'm gonna show you an example of a team of the season in Bapay because again, just like we saw SPC fodder going up and such a huge push towards the squad building challenge content, take a look at some of the meta cards in this game and the drop offs that they had, some of the biggest in history, right? Tats in Bapay, FIFA 20 starts off at 3 million coins, drops down to 1.9 at his absolute lowest during the year, Tats in Bapay, FIFA 21 starts off at 5.7, though, right? Obviously a more meta card, the links to Neymar, more meta than FIFA 20 for this in Bapay, in my opinion, more sought after. And you saw things that were super duper meta this year in FIFA 21, they were more expensive than ever. Tats Neymar, extinct to 10 million coins, right? That was just an insane price right away but people, this year as well, we talk about meta cards, paid more and more and literally would pay whatever it took to get the most meta cards in the game. So last year, Tats in Bapay starts off 3.5 million coins. This year he starts off at five, high fives, but look how low he goes. Last year in Bapay, barely went under two mil. This guy goes down to 1.1. This guy was released back in packs too. Don't make a mistake about that. He went from 2.5 down to 1.9. He was released back in packs during summer heat and during pre-season and all that stuff. This year in Bapay goes down to 1.1 mil. It's just crazy the amount of drop offs that you saw in this game. I mean, you even take a look at gold in Bapay, both years, right? 89 in Bapay from FIFA 20 started off at about 1.1 million coins, dropped off to be 60K, but in April he was 520K, right? What about in Bapay this year? Bapay this year was 500K more off the start, almost 1.5 mil, but what was he in April? He was 480K. So we started off 500K more expensive than in FIFA 20, but he was even cheaper, 300K when we got into April. So again, the amount of drop off on the high tier cards this year was insane and that's gonna happen again in FIFA 21 because FIFA 21, it seems like there's gonna be more consistent demand with the champions playoffs, the division rivals, the new format for that. It seems like there's gonna be more weekly demand, but still, the reason why those cards drop off so much is because EA is continually releasing players through SBCs, through objectives and more cards, more promos than ever and that just creates turnover and it creates people saying, okay, I'm gonna sell my Mbappe, sell the card that I have to go get the new card, the next biggest and greatest thing that has been released into packs. So in terms of the market in FIFA 21, I think what we can learn is there's gonna be more price fluctuations than ever. You thought FIFA 21 was crazy with panic selling and even with outside market influence, like traders, stuff that we do, not specifically guys on like this channel but specific trading groups that shout out a specific player and say, hey, go buy this card and artificially inflate the market. Just the amount of investing and patreons, that influence on the market was greater than ever and that's gonna be taken to a whole new level because more and more people get involved with that stuff, especially with how easy it was to make coins in FIFA 21, people had a good year, right? And they were able to have more coins than ever and that's gonna mean that more people are involved in trading and stuff like that. So of course, we're gonna be very, very careful with the market and know when, really try to figure out when there's too much hype and when a player is over-invested selling into that hype and knowing when market rises are legit with legit demand or if they are saturated with investors and just being bought up and inflated because of that. So that's gonna be a huge part of the FIFA 22 market as well on this game. So this is so much, again, the biggest takeaways from FIFA 21 are just the increased quantity of the content, right? I think one area that FIFA 22 is gonna really step up is the objectives, right? I think they're gonna just do a whole new side of objectives, like tiered objectives, whether it's with the foot heroes or whatever it's gonna be. We'll release a video later on talking about what I would like to see in FIFA 22 objective-wise, but overall, it was just an insane year of content and I think that it's even gonna get better into FIFA 22. Now, of course, not all the content was good value, right? We mentioned that earlier. So of course, we're gonna have to try to figure it out. Hey, in this year, more than ever, coin management and just club management, knowing when to do an SBC, when to not do an SBC, right? That kind of stuff is gonna become even more important this year in FIFA 22. So hopefully this video helped you guys out and just was kind of a nice review of FIFA 21 as well, just remembering a lot of things and some of my takeaways from FIFA 21. But if you have any questions or comments, drop them specifically down below in the comments. If you did enjoy, smash a thumbs up and of course, subscribe if you are new. It's been Nathan Vodakow and I will catch you guys later. Peace out.