Cristiano Ronaldo for €100 million. Neymar for €222m. Alisson for €62.5m. Transfers in real life have gone very expensive.
Luckily, it costs much less to buy players in FIFA 19, but building your Ultimate Team can still set you back plenty of in-game coins.
Many FIFA players earn most of their coins through playing matches, winning leagues and participating in the weekend league, squad battles and daily knockout tournaments. However, there are also other ways to make money including trading, sniping, investing and playing the market.
This all sounds pretty complicated, but is actually not that difficult and will reward you for the time you put in.
Goal explains how to trade in FIFA 19, helping you make coins in Ultimate Team in order to build your perfect squad:
USE THE BRONZE PACK METHOD
EA Sports
There's no better feeling in FIFA Ultimate Team than pulling a superstar player from a pack. After putting in your hard-earned coins, the pack opens and reveals a walkout animation. "Please be Ronaldo, please be Ronaldo." It's very, very rarely Ronaldo, but it provides a buzz that is equivalent only to winning the league in Online Seasons.
Instead of Ronaldo, you usually open a pack where the best player is Jordan Henderson, and thus the money spent on the pack will never find its way back into your coin balance - as the contents are worth much less than you paid for them.
But making money from packs is not impossible. In fact, it's quite easy as long as you have time and patience. The Bronze Pack Method involves purchasing the lowest price pack available - the 400 coin bronze one - and then selling everything from it. If you get even one good item, you will make a profit, but most of the contents can be listed and re-listed until they sell.
This was slightly less effective in FIFA 18, as bronze in form items were no longer awarded (bronzes in Team of the Week were bumped up to silvers), but as the packs only cost 400 or 750 coins, they will almost always make a profit.
Bronze fitness cards and rare bronze players will often guarantee an instant profit, even before you sell any of the remaining items in the packs. Squad Building Challenges, especially the individual team ones needed to complete league collections, mean that many bronze rares are worth 1,000s of coins.
You'll probably not open too many of these super-expensive bronzes, but even if you list everything at 150/200 coins, you will surely make a profit anyway.
BUY UNDERPRICED PLAYERS
What do you want? Rare gold striker. When do you want it? Now!
FIFA gamers have this mentality when adding new players to their squads, therefore will use the Buy It Now (BIN) option rather than bidding on the auction and waiting to see whether their bid is successful.
Using the BIN option also avoids getting into a bidding war with other gamers, where you end up overpaying for a player just because you were invested and were too stubborn to move to a different version of the same player.
If you are patient and willing to wait until the auction has ended, you usually can get players for lower than their regular BIN amounts. There is usually a good difference between the normal auction price and the BIN amount, meaning you can buy players for lower than their BIN, re-list them at or just under this amount and watch the profits roll in.
When selling players on the market, five per cent of the sale price will be lost to stop people price-fixing and swapping players between teams. Therefore, to ensure you make a profit when trading on the market, always take this EA tax into account. For example, if you buy a player for 900 coins and sell him for 1,000 coins, you will only receive 950 coins after the item is sold because of this five per cent tax.
Many basic rare gold cards sell for 1,000 coins Buy It Now, but can be purchased for less. You can purchase many players for 650 or 700 coins who have a 10,000 BIN and then place them up for sale with a 1,000 BIN and see them sell quickly. This can result in a 250-300 coin profit on each player. Like the Bronze Pack method, this also involves a lot of patience to make big profits over time.
BUY AND SELL FAMILIAR PLAYERS
The best way to make money on a regular basis is to buy and sell players you know that come from a league or nation you follow closely. You will get to know their value, their rarity, as well as whether they are likely to receive in-form versions.
Each league will have particular players that are valued highly because they are among the best players in their position, but are not rated 85+, so seem affordable for the vast majority of gamers. Full-backs and wingers are usually in smaller supply, while players with higher pace attributes are more popular than slower ones.
If you are familiar with these players in your favourite leagues, you will understand the supply and demand for them and therefore can buy them for under their market value and then sell for higher BIN prices.
Also, some of the lower-rated players can have a higher market price than higher-rated ones in the same position - like Marcus Rashford, Lucas Moura or Jamie Vardy in the Premier League, for example. Knowledge of players like this can give you the edge on the transfer market, especially if you regularly buy and sell the same players, learning their value and when are the best times to buy and sell.
SNIPE PLAYERS ON 59 MINUTES
Probably the most well known of the FIFA trading techniques, the 59-minute method has been around for as long as FIFA Ultimate Team has.
It's a way to "snipe" players by grabbing them almost immediately after they are listed on the transfer market. Some gamers do not realise the value of the players they open in packs and automatically list them at low prices.
If you use the Buy It Now filter when searching for players, you can restrict your searches for underpriced players and try to get in quickly with a BIN bid before someone else does the same thing. You can do this with individual players, searching over and over until you find one that has been listed at a low price.
Another approach is to carry out a wider search with fewer filters and cycle back and forth through the transfer pages at 59 minutes-1 hour and watch for new items appearing on the market. Going back and forth through the pages will reload them and show newly added players on the market.
PLAN FOR MARQUEE MATCHUPS
Each week, EA Sports release four Squad Building Challenges (SBCs) known as Marquee Matchups. These are four important games from the upcoming weekend, which usually include at least one game from some of the less popular leagues.
The SBCs provide pack and coin rewards for each matchup, as well as an overall reward for completing all four challenges. Unlike other SBCs, the requirements from these are usually straightforward - a small number of players from the teams involved.
Predicting the Marquee Matchups can be tricky, but getting it right can be hugely profitable as the players from the teams involved go up in price when the SBCs are announced.
Users on FIFA Reddit and FIFA Forums often try to predict these Marquee Matchups in advance, and the games included each week always see a spike in the value of their players. As a result, correctly predicting upcoming Marquee Matchups can allow you to invest in players to sell at a higher price once the SBCs go live.
NEVER BUY FIFA COINS
The easiest way to get more FIFA coins is to buy them. But it's also the stupidest. Buying FIFA coins online is banned by EA Sports and thus is severely punished. Buying coins is essentially seen as cheating as you don't even have to play any matches to make millions.
Anyone found buying FIFA coins usually receives an initial warning email from EA Sports. Then further infringements result in having their coin balance emptied, their team deleted or even see their account banned. Selling FIFA coins is also prohibited and usually results in even harsher penalties from EA Sports, including immediate banning of your account.
If you get your account banned from FIFA 19, you won't be able to play FIFA Ultimate Team again this year and will have to wait until FIFA 20 to play again!
INVEST IN IN-FORM CARDS
Like the Marquee Matchups, gamers try to predict each week's Team of the Week (TOTW). These are released every Wednesday at 6:00 p.m. GMT and contain a full squad of players who put in excellent performances in the past seven days.
The normal versions of these players often go up in value as they will not be available in packs for a week, but investing in these is often a lottery. Instead, buying the in-forms (IFs) themselves is a much more clever approach.
These cards are usually available for limited periods and thus become rarer as the season goes on due to players discarding them or using them in SBCs. If you buy the cheapest gold IFs for around 10,000 coins or less, they will never lose you money as their quick sell price is around this amount anyway.
However, as they become less common on the market, their price should go up, especially if IFs or specific leagues are required in SBCs. It's a slow strategy, but one than can earn 1,000s per each investment.