It’s been like this for a while now, probably going back two or three events when the difficulty tuning really went overboard. The last time it happened, several months ago, we had to wait until the event ended before they finally toned it down. It was nowhere near as bad as it is now. Either the difficulty needs to drop, or the rewards need to actually reflect the level of sadism inflicted on players.
There is a fine line between a hard but fair challenge and an impossible, irritating matches, namely the Weekend Challenge and the World Class Football Centre games.
Like yourself, I always reach the Championship in all three modes and have hit Masters and top 250 in past seasons. I don’t grind anymore because the PvP gameplay is too broken and full of cheats, all for a penny. Still, even with a fully trained meta squad and years of experience, it’s extremely difficult to get through this messy challenge — and that’s after figuring out how to deal with the nonsense (no sprint/no attacking mode, pass the ball about, set up CAM for finesse 2x in the game, then park the bus/maintain your possession on the opponents half).
This morning, couldn't beat it for the first time in months. I have given up after about a dozen tries, where as soon as I equalised, I got slapped with two instant goals that were unpreventable with a handicap imposed on high-performance teams. Frankly ridiculous.