Madden’s Best Mode Is Totally Broken at the Worst Time
EA Sports Madden NFL Football has always been a landmark franchise. Even if you don’t play it every year you probably know someone who plays it religiously and could info-dump for hours about how the minute changes made to the annually updated game matter because they change 100 different details you forget to even think about. The people who are so obsessively focused on a single game that they buy an entire console just to experience each new release — they’ve been fully Madden-pilled.
When EA announced a bundle that included the ultimate editions of both College Football 25 and Madden 25 together, fans absolutely bought in. One of the big upsells in these versions is the inclusion of premium currency, paid for by real dollars rather than earned by playing, and other pre-order items that provide an exclusive jumpstart for the game’s premier offering: Ultimate Team mode.
The problem is that Ultimate Team is predatory, with some pretty clear advantages toward those who are willing to pay-to-win. But how?
Ultimate Team is the “fantasy football” portion of Madden that allows players to curate their own personal dream team from all the best players in the league. Yet you can’t just pick anyone; players come from cards gathered in-game, but it’s a random draw. And the method of acquiring them can be alluringly deceptive.
The odds of getting players that will actually improve your team from a single trading card-like booster pack are usually only about 30 percent. Yet like many of their IRL sports-junkie counterparts, players are willing to take the risk knowing that they only need one good result for everything to change. The gambling-adjacent aspect of digital card packs hidden behind blind boxes have always raised the ire of reporters, parents, and just a general audience who isn’t here for the boom or bust nature of card-collecting games. What people don’t often talk about is that the mode as a concept has been burning goodwill for years. With this week’s latest update, timed right to the official kick-off of the 2024 NFL season, it’s gotten even worse.
What is Madden Ultimate Team?
Madden Ultimate Team (MUT) is a simple concept: A player will take players from all 32 NFL teams, compete with them, earn coins to get better-rated athletes, and win more games to earn more coins to buy even better ones. As users get better cards they can take their duplicates or some lower rated items that they no longer want and sell them on a live auction house where prices are set by the other players. This allows some to progress without ever opening a traditional blind box pack of cards, instead saving coins to get hyper specific about which upgrades they make to a team. Or they can take their cards and exchange them for new ones.
Through continually updating goals that offer rewards, Ultimate Team mode generally demands that players log in regularly to maximize their chances of performing well. Daily and weekly challenges task players with stat-based objectives like, “Throw 1,200 passing yards” or, “Force three fumbles.” If missions are skipped or missed, so are the rewards, which are front-loaded to offer the best perks leading up to the real-life NFL season. That makes this week the most urgent time to collect rewards to put players ahead of the curve for the entire season ahead. Plenty of people are still playing MUT in the off-season, even right up until July, around the time that the next year’s version of the game is shown off. But for many, the most important window is between the Madden release date and the Super Bowl. The game is most popular when the actual NFL season is ongoing.
When MUT is working well it’s a rewarding experience that is supposed to push you into winning more frequently. The most joyful moments in the Madden community haven’t been related to gameplay, but rather are about times where all the luck seems turned in a player’s favor. There’s true joy in watching someone spend every last coin they have to get a single pack, only to open it up and get a top-end card. Getting a 25,000 coin pack out of your daily objectives rather than the minimum 2,000 can motivate you to play more games to be able to use the coins faster. While all of this sounds perfectly fine, [the balance of time to acquire good cards is sliding into the predatory. The amount of time saved by randomly acquiring a high value card is more convenient anything the mode can actually give you.
What are the issues with the MUT Marketplace?
If the start of the NFL season should be a celebration of football, real and digital alike, why are players so upset on platforms like the Madden Ultimate Team Subreddit? The biggest negative shift in tone came from the addition of Madden Points to the Ultimate editions. While spending 4,400 points (equal to $40 of premium currency) for shortcuts in progression looks appealing, it has changed the dynamic of the mode. By creating a pay-to-progress model, the developers know that they can charge a premium for booster packs, which players will do — with haste. And the speed at which currency is being spent also gets ratcheted up in time.
When you first start the mode you’re given the ability to buy a full offensive and defensive lineup for 2,200 points each. These 4,400 points are the exact number you get when you buy the most expensive version of the game. If you buy both of these offers, you’ll end up with an 80 Overall (OVR) team. While that 80 OVR team can be a helpful jumpstart for a new player, it’s a short-sighted investment because weekly offers — or offers on specific holidays like Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas — usually provide better value. And that kind of demand to give into spending is all over the mode.
Okay, so packs are bad. Then why can’t you just save your coins and buy the cards you want? Well that’s because the coin prices for packs are also very high, meaning that they stay high in the Auction House when you go to buy them. A Legends Pack which includes three cards cost 86,000 coins. Legends players are generally meant to be the top-end premium items when these cards come out and are deeply sought after. Even weeks after his initial debut, 85 OVR legend tight end Greg Olsen is still selling for 192,000 coins in order for cards to go down in value, new higher rated cards need to be introduced at the same position as other cards. Cards will lose value, but that’s only determined by being aware of how prices fluctuate This process of tracking cards has gotten so sophisticated that there are entire sites like mut.gg to help keep track of when new cards are coming out and how many are selling. EA has done its best to include more details in game, but there’s still no way to target a specific player for a specific price and that could go a long way to making the market experience more friendly for everyone.
How are recurring players favored over casual ones?
The core problem isn’t just the price of the cards, but that coins just don’t come fast enough. MUT has developed so many different ways to play the game, both against the CPU and other players that to fully maximize earning in all of them requires playing at least 50 different individual games each week. To put that in perspective, that’s like playing three full NFL seasons every week. and that’s only if you’re not pushing for the top prizes. One of the new ways to play MUT is to play Solo Seasons. In Solo Seasons you play an increasingly difficult set of games until you finally get a loss.
In theory, the mode is meant to add infinite replayability, but in practice is a way to hide fewer rewards behind more matches. You are only rewarded every three to five matches as opposed to getting coins and other rewards every win. This normally wouldn’t be a problem, except that the first few sets of matches reward less than 1,000 coins. This means that you need to play about 10 before you start getting any meaningful rewards, and even for the most locked-in Madden player, that still might take over an hour. Let’s remember that a legends pack has a forever price of 86,000 coins. And that at the time of writing most players around 84 OVR cost about 100,000 coins.
You can play Solo Battles, which are CPU games where you’re trying to get a high score. The higher the difficulty, the more points you earn and your total is the combination of 28 games played over one week. One positive change they made this year is instead of needing to play a certain number of games per day before they expire, you get to play all 28 games at your own pace. The struggle that many players run into is that in order to get the top rewards, you need to win as many games as possible on the top difficulty level of All-Madden difficulty. Even for hardcore players who have hundreds of hours logged already, it can feel like a mind breaking chore to maintain the grind.
If you want to play against humans rather than the CPU, there’s Head to Head seasons, where thankfully the rewards do show up after every game. The only issue here is that coin rewards have been absolutely slashed compared to last year. In Madden 24 you could work your way up a ladder system and could earn up to 7,500 coins per win if you climbed high enough. There were seven different divisions that would all reward different packs for getting promoted by winning enough games.
In Madden 25 there are only three divisions and the top one earns 3,000 coins per win; the middle division only rewards 500 coins per win. Madden has never had a winning game payout that low in the entire history of the seasonal mechanic. It also doesn’t help that many times, if your opponent happens to forfeit or disconnect from the game in the first quarter, you don’t get the coin payout for winning that specific game.
One of the biggest universal issues of any live service product is that, if someone happens to jump on late it’s very possible they’ll miss landmark content. If a person prefers to wait until NFL games have started, they’ve already missed chances to get meaningful cards, like an 85 OVR version of cover star Christian McCaffrey. Sure, better players will become available, but its very possible that even a superstar household name will only get three or four cards a year, so it could be months before McCaffery has another card. Madden uses a season-specific currency, and if players fail to redeem those tickets before a season expires they disappear. In previous years, half of those tickets would roll over into the next season’s drop. This year, however, all the redeemable items from season one are gone. Some small bits of content like challenges will remain throughout the year, but they only offer a reduced amount of coins. The game heavily favors those who play religiously, while hanging casual ones out to dry with clear disadvantages through the limited resources they can obtain.
But sometimes a new season is a great jumping on point.. Many players get excited at all the brand new content that drops at the start of a season. Except Madden 25 started this season on a Monday, but didn’t have any new content to chase until the games started on Thursday. It’s this kind of seemingly small mismanagement that makes Madden 25 feel lost. There’s nothing creative in the new battle pass. And the big XP token players get for finishing the season one battle pass only covers a level and a half of progress in a 50 level pass.
Can it be improved?
In Madden 25, there’s more ways to play than ever, but it’s accompanied with more responsibility to chase all of these different reward buckets. It’s a double-edged sword. Now, consider that College Football 25 has its own Ultimate Team mode with all of these same requirements. For anyone who wants to engage in both games, there’s a constant tug-of-war to perform well in each simultaneously.
With the in-game calendar advancing in real time, it’s clear these supposed complimentary games are in direct conflict for players’ time and energy. While the first season of content in College Ultimate team gave you a level booster for Madden 25 to help you advance in the battle pass, neither game includes anything like that in this second battle pass.
So, what can be done to fix this? The answer may lie in [telemetry data. If less people are playing Ultimate Team or refrain from spending money there’s a very small possibility EA will listen. Until then, it’s just money to be made on the trading card gambling grift tucked away inside one of the world’s biggest sports games.
