FIFA 15 Team of the Year Preview

Once a year, a team featuring the best players of the year is announced. On FIFA 15 this is the TOTY, which is released on the 12th of January. Such as the Happy Hours, this release is responsible for thousands of pack openings. It also means severe price falls. The biggest difference is that everything happens at an absolute immense scale: these cards are the best in the game, they come in packs for one week and prices fall to never before seen values.

The effect caused by the Team of the Year is felt way before it’s even announced. The game barely starts and there are already some players planning on building their squads in January, at a point when buying the best players will cost them the same as how much they’d spend building an average team in the beginning. Many others decide to monetize their teams, selling them all before the TOTY comes out and then buying it all again. The start of a more severe devaluation happens before Christmas and is prolonged until the TOTY release.

The cards’ prices on the market follow, generally, the tendency illustrated on the following image. We can divide this price behaviour by the following stages:
Stage 1 – Before the TOTY release
Prices start to fall more severely as from the third week of December.
Stage 2 – TOTY release day (12th of January 2015, Monday)
Cards get cheaper.
Stage 3 – Second day of TOTY (13th of January 2015, Tuesday)
Prices slightly rise because the market is saturated with defenders.
Stage 4 – Third and fourth days of TOTY (14th and 15th of January 2015, Wednesday and Thursday)
Prices rise even more because there are only 3 TOTY players available in packs instead of 5 and because everyone is waiting for the most valuable cards to come out: the attackers.
Stage 5 – Fifth and sixth days of TOTY (16th and 17th of January 2015, Friday and Saturday)
Prices fall with the release of the most wanted cards: the attackers.
Stage 6 – Seventh day of TOTY (18th of January 2015, Sunday)
Cards get even cheaper since now all TOTY cards are available in packs.
Stage 7 – The week after TOTY
Prices go back to rising progressively until the end of the next week. They don’t hit values as high as the ones on stage 1 but aren’t as low as any of the other stages.

During the TOTY week it’s very common for Happy Hours to be released, including 100k packs, so the price behaviour during this period can still suffer alterations.