Holy smokes, that finally happened! EA Sports finally decided to remove one of the most annoying FIFA Ultimate Team game mode features which angered many fans of the series for many years. In a post on the official FIFA 21 site, developers confirmed that this year’s Ultimate Team removes the use of fitness items, staff coaches, and training items. Hip hip hooray!

If you’re not an avid FIFA fan, you might be wondering what all this fuss is about. Allow us to explain… Since FIFA Ultimate Team mode’s inception back in 2008, this mode has featured something called player fitness levels. This was intended as a mechanic to force players to rotate their Ultimate Team squads. However, it was annoying as hell and never really worked as intended. Now, 12 years later EA Sports decided to ditch this idea and remove it altogether.

Here’s the official snipped of the post:

“In an effort to streamline the systems in the game we’ve decided, for different reasons, to remove both Fitness and Training items in FUT 21.

Fitness items have been a light management element in Ultimate Team since the very beginning. The decay of players’ fitness was put in the game originally to encourage rotation in the squad and to simulate some of the management decisions that football squads have to consider.

However, we’ve evaluated these mechanics and have decided that it wasn’t creating the desired effect in rotation and players were spending time doing a management action that was frequently required and, ultimately, not very fun.

So this year, while Fitness and Player Stamina will still be important factors inside of a match, dictating, for example, how much you can sprint and for how long, you will no longer have to manage that mechanic in the menus as well.

All players in FUT 21 will start every game at full Fitness.

Training items were also a legacy staple in the game, allowing the application of stat boosts to players for a single game.

This mechanic was not something that was being used in game by the vast majority of players so we’ve decided, rather than to continue with this feature and give people items in packs that they’re not using, to remove it and simplify this space in-game.

As a result of these two changes, we’re also removing Fitness, Training & Healing related Staff Items from the game.

We’ve also taken the opportunity to simplify Healing Items. In FUT 21 Healing Items will no longer be targeted at specific injuries. There will only be two Healing Items in the game: Gold common and rare Items.

These will be applicable to any injury type and will reduce the injury duration by 2 matches and 5 matches respectively.

Packs in FUT 21 have been rebalanced around these changes and we’ve added a suite of new licensed club customization options, from club Tifos and Stadium Themes for a range of major clubs in FUT, to the already available kits and badges that you currently find in packs, to help better realize your customization vision. We’re also going to slightly increase the frequency of Chemistry Styles to help you customize the effects of Chemistry more readily to your liking.”

So what does it mean for the future? Well, your card packs will be cleaner, meaning that fitness items, staff coaches, and training items are no more, and your odds of getting your desired items are increased. This is great news for everyone who loved “surprise mechanics”, meaning that building your dream squad is much easier with FIFA 21.

FIFA 21 will have a huge variety of other changes and new additions to the Ultimate Team mode such as FUT Co-op, FUT Events, dynamic stadiums, and competitive mode improvements. If you’re interested, we recommend reading a full post here. 

The new FIFA 21 game seems like something that will refine the series and will do a lot in order to make fans of the series happy, fixing major issues with the franchise. According to EA Sports, there are a lot more announcements planned in the future, and news we got so far promises a huge leap in the right direction. We can’t wait to learn more!

FIFA 21 is scheduled to be released on October 9th for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch, and Google Stadia. You can pre-order the game from our store.