The EA FC 24 Ultimate TOTS is out—and it’s not what we were expecting

The Ultimate TOTS is supposed to be the culmination of the Team of the Season promo event and the whole Ultimate Team season. But the EA FC 24 Ultimate TOTS took an odd approach to completing this task, making some selections we weren’t expecting.

The first thing that immediately stands out is the complete lack of goalkeepers. Shot stoppers have been underrepresented in this year’s Team of the Season, but all releases so far attempted to at least include one. Apparently, EA decided that’s plenty enough.

Another selection decision that took us by surprise is the obvious disregard for Ligue 1 and its champions Paris Saint-Germain. We did kind of call the competition a farmer’s league in our EA FC 24 Ligue 1 TOTS review, but just two players on the EA FC 24 Ultimate Team of the Season seems a bit too harsh, especially when all other leagues have four or five players included.

Aside from the obvious, EA also pulled off its specialty of needlessly including weaker players where there are better options available from the same league or at the same position, and sometimes both. We don’t see 96 OVR Vitinha, but there’s 94 OVR Lewis Ferguson. We get 93 OVR Nico Schlotterbeck instead of 96 OVR Alessandro Bastoni, and 94 OVR Golovin instead of 96 OVR Dybala or Griezmann.

We’re used to it, but it feels particularly cheap for the Ultimate Team of the Season, where you’d expect the best of the best and nothing less, and we know for a fact there were better players available for selection. We can’t use league balancing to defend EA either because it had zero issues with cutting down Ligue 1 content to a minimum.

All of this doesn’t make the EA FC 24 Team of the Season bad, but it’s definitely on the weird and somewhat disappointing side. It being a collection of the best players from the league Teams of the Season also means that the best players are “only” 97 OVR. Yet again, it’s not that these players are bad, but we had similar quality months ago during Team of the Year, so we can’t help but feel slightly underwhelmed.

All players on the EA FC 24 Ultimate Team of the Season

• ST: Lisandro Martinez – 97 OVR (Inter)
• LB: Theo Hernandez – 97 OVR (AC Milan)
• CAM: Jude Bellingham – 97 OVR (Real Madrid)
• ST: Kylian Mbappe – 97 OVR (Paris Saint-Germain)
• ST: Erling Haaland – 97 OVR (Manchester City)
• CB: Virgil van Dijk – 97 OVR (Liverpool)
• RWB: Jeremie Frimpong – 97 OVR (Bayer Leverkusen)
• ST: Harry Kane – 97 OVR (Bayern Munchen)
• ST: Vini Jr. – 96 OVR (Real Madrid)
• CM: Federico Valverde – 96 OVR (Real Madrid)
• CM: Declan Rice – 96 OVR (Arsenal)
• ST: Robert Lewandowski – 95 OVR (Barcelona)
• RW: Mohamed Salah – 95 OVR (Liverpool)
• LM: Rafael Leao – 95 OVR (AC Milan)
• LWB: Alejandro Grimaldo – 95 OVR (Bayer Leverkusen)
• CAM: Jamal Musiala – 95 OVR (Bayern Munchen)
• CM: Lewis Ferguson – 94 OVR (Bologna)
• CAM: Phil Foden – 94 OVR (Manchester City)
• CF: Aleksandr Golovin – 94 OVR (Monaco)
• LM: Savio – 93 OVR (Girona)
• CB: Nico Schlotterbeck – 93 OVR (Borussia Dortmund)

The EA FC 24 Women’s TOTS is helped by having much fewer players on it, eight to the men’s 21. This doesn’t leave enough room for the quality to drop off as drastically, but we do see some similar issues, like the absence of goalkeepers, PSG getting shafted again with just one of their super strong players making it, and high OVR players being left out in favor of weaker players at the same position or from the same league.

All players on the EA FC 24 Women’s Team of the Season

• ST: Lauren James – 97 OVR (Chelsea)
• ST: Sophia Smith – 97 OVR (Portland Thorns)
• CM: Aitana Bonmati – 97 OVR (Barcelona)
• ST: Tabitha Chawinga – 96 OVR (Paris Saint-Germain)
• CAM: Debinha – 95 OVR (Kansas City Current)
• LM: Lauren Hemp – 95 OVR (Manchester City)
• LB: Selma Bacha – 94 OVR (Olympique Lyonnais)
• CDM: Georgia Stanway – 94 OVR (Bayern Munchen)

The conclusion of Team of the Season is traditionally the start of the offseason period where interest gradually begins to shift toward the next game in the series. The EA FC 25 release date will have to wait for now, though, because this summer we have Euro 2024 to keep EA FC 24 Ultimate Team well and alive for at least the next month and a half. Maybe EA has left the elusive 99 OVR cards for that occasion—we’ve almost forgotten what those look like.