FC 27's Biggest FUT Overhaul Kills Chemistry in SBCs

EA Sports has spent years layering complexity onto Ultimate Team's Squad Building Challenges, turning what should be a straightforward card-exchange system into a puzzle of chemistry links, position modifiers, and league requirements. FC 27 is going in the opposite direction. Chemistry requirements in SBCs are gone entirely, replaced by a score-based system that doesn't care how you hit the number.

According to the FC 27 Ultimate Team deep dive published by EA Sports, each SBC will now set a target score, and players submit cards until they reach it. Rarity and overall rating determine how much each card contributes. A handful of promo cards could clear a challenge that would otherwise take dozens of silvers. Chemistry, rarity thresholds, and positional requirements are all stripped out. As Destructoid's breakdown put it, this means those hundreds of low-rated silvers rotting in your club finally have a purpose beyond daily SBCs.

I think this is a smart change, and one that's long overdue. SBC chemistry requirements have been one of Ultimate Team's worst friction points for years. They punished casual players who didn't have the right league-nation combinations sitting in their clubs, while hardcore traders just gamed the market anyway. Removing chemistry from SBCs doesn't dumb the mode down; it removes busywork that mostly existed to push pack sales.

FUT Gallery and Card Grading

The other headline addition is the FUT Gallery, a collection system that borrows heavily from real-world trading card culture. Every player card you've ever owned, whether you packed it, bought it, or already discarded it, counts toward themed sets based on clubs, leagues, and nations. Complete a set and it gets graded on a D-to-S scale depending on the quality of cards you submitted. Higher-rated and rarer cards push your grade up.

As Dexerto reported, completing sets earns gallery tokens that can be exchanged for Hall of FUT items, which feature fan-favourite Ultimate Team legends like Hulk and Fellaini. There are also new holographic cards with player signatures that carry no stat boost but have inflated gallery values, making them pure collector's items. The whole system is clearly modelled on graded card collecting, and it gives cards a third purpose beyond playing them or feeding them into SBCs.

Single-player live events are also joining the mode for the first time. Until now, live events in Ultimate Team have been exclusively PvP. FC 27 adds AI-driven events with escalating difficulty, culminating in a final round at Ultimate difficulty. It's a small but meaningful addition for the portion of the FUT playerbase that avoids competitive play.

What strikes me about this year's Ultimate Team pitch is how much of it is about reducing frustration rather than adding flashy new card types. The SBC overhaul removes a barrier. The gallery retroactively rewards cards you've already owned. The single-player events give non-competitive players something to do during promos. None of this is revolutionary on its own, but taken together it suggests EA Sports is finally listening to the complaints that have echoed through FUT communities for the better part of a decade.

FC 27 launches later this year alongside a rebuilt Career Mode transfer system and the new open-world Grounds mode. Whether the SBC changes survive contact with the live economy is another matter, but this is the most player-friendly set of FUT changes EA has shipped in a long time.