Connecting to EA servers...
I found a big where you can't connect to EA servers if you skip the connection when the game is loading. While it should be able to connect from the main menu when I launch Ultimate Team, it always fails to connect there.
The "fix" is I have to restart the game and let the game connect to the servers on the loading screen. It's a real pain because the loading screen halts and won't load without a prompt to start loading for no good reason, so it's very easy to click twice and skip the connect to server and be forced to do the who process over again.
So fix/remove the pause on the loading screen and just load to menu when I open the game, as all other normal games do, and correct whatever broken code is trying to connect to the wrong servers from the menu.