FIFA 23 announcement season has just reached its climax as EA Sports has finally lifted the lid on what’s in store for FIFA Ultimate Team fans by the time the FIFA 23 release date rolls around. Arguably the biggest change to the popular and lucrative mode is a huge overhaul to team chemistry, which will give players a lot more freedom when it comes to creating a devastating squad.
In previous iterations of Ultimate Team, chemistry has always been dished out by adjacent players – centre backs to goalkeepers, attacking midfielders to strikers, and so on – with the goal of all players sitting on nine or ten chemistry to give you an overall squad chemistry of 100. That’s all been thrown out for FIFA 23. Squad chemistry ratings, direct yellow or green links between nearby players, and loyalty bonuses have all been scrapped.
The overall concept of chemistry remains largely the same – players earn chemistry from sharing leagues, clubs, or nationalities with other members of your squad. But the goal now is to ensure each individual player has as much chemistry as you need them to have by including similar players anywhere in your starting 11. Also, chemistry is no longer rated out of ten anymore – you instead have three Chemistry Points that you’ll want to try and achieve.
Each Chemistry Point has a threshold, so having X amount of French players will award you with a point of chemistry for all your French players, and having X amount of Premier League players will net you chemistry for your Premier League players, and so on.
Also, each player in Ultimate Team has a Preferred Position on their base card, and they can only gain and give chemistry to other members of the team if they are in that position. However, each player comes with two Alternative Positions as well, and these can be made their Preferred Position with the use of the now streamlined Position Modifier item. That means no more ST → CF cards or CM → CDM cards, there’s just one item that can change your position.
As well as changing how you get chemistry, EA is also changing how chemistry affects your players’ abilities on the pitch. Previously, there was a sliding scale where ten chemistry would see your player performing at their very best, while having just one chemistry would see their in-game stats actually drop below what they should be.
In FIFA 23, players will no longer be negatively impacted by chemistry. The stats you see on their cards are the minimum in-game stats they will have, regardless of what position they are playing in and how much chemistry they have. This means Kylian Mbappe will perform exactly as intended even if you play him as a centre-back. It also means that you can try out new players without having to build a completely new team around them, and players from lesser used nations and leagues will now be somewhat more viable as they won’t negatively impact any of the other players in your squad.
However, increasing a player’s chemistry will increase their stats, as well as the effectiveness of Chemistry Styles, so it’s worth trying to get as many Chemistry Points on a player as possible.
Basically, there are a whole load of changes, and they’re going to be super difficult to wrap your head around if you’ve been playing FUT for a long time. However, this really does increase the possibilities for squad building. If you thought FIFA 22 Ultimate Team had a pretty varied meta, FIFA 23 will blow that out of the water.
A lot more information on the chemistry changes can be found in this Pitch Notes article, but EA has also said that another Pitch Notes specifically focused on Ultimate Team chemistry will be dropping in the near future.
If you’re thirsty for more information ahead of the FIFA 23 release date, you can read up on all the confirmed FIFA 23 Hero cards that are coming to Ultimate Team, and can see our predictions for the top ten FIFA 23 ratings.