Locking home kits behind forced game modes

I’ve been playing Ultimate Team for years, and one of the things I’ve always loved is building a club identity. Picking a badge, a stadium, a theme, and, most importantly, the kits. Getting your home kit through the market and seeing your squad in your colours was part of what made the club feel like yours.

In FC 27, that’s gone. I can’t buy home team kits the way I used to, and it feels like a real step backwards.

The pack weights. EA has limited the pack weights for home team kits so severely that opening packs and hoping to get your club’s kit isn’t a realistic route. This isn’t a “rare drop” situation where you can grind or get lucky. It feels like the odds were deliberately set to push you somewhere else.

And “somewhere else” means galleries and other modes. If you want your club’s home kit, you’re being herded into galleries and game modes that many of us have no interest in. Some of us play Ultimate Team to build a squad and play the market. We don’t want to be told we have to complete a pile of tasks in a mode we didn’t choose just to put our own team’s shirt on our players. That isn’t a reward system, it’s a gate.

It’s hard to see this as an accident. Limiting the supply through packs while funnelling access through specific modes looks like a deliberate decision to force engagement with content, not to give players more ways to enjoy the game. Players already have plenty of reasons to engage with game modes. Forcing it by removing a long-standing option isn’t “adding depth”, it’s taking something away and calling the replacement content.

Cosmetics and club customisation are the personal side of this game. They don’t affect competitive balance, so there’s no good reason to lock them down this tightly. Letting people earn or buy their kits through the market was a great system, because everyone could get there their own way: grinding, trading, or spending. Now there’s one path, and it’s the one EA picked.