Also see our list of the best cheap players in FIFA 12 Ultimate Team here.
FIFA Ultimate Team has come to revolve around money. Coins, rather. With a large amount of coins at your disposal, you can purchase fun and effective teams, but just getting enough coins can be difficult. There is a variety of different methods and tricks you can use to make money in FIFA 12 Ultimate team. Some have been effective since earlier versions of FIFA Ultimate team, so you might already be familiar with a few if you're a veteran. Remember though, that a lot of money making in FIFA 12 Ultimate team is just luck, so don't be discouraged if none of these methods make you rich immediately. Just persist, and eventually you'll get lucky, I can almost guarantee it.
Click here for a more thorough guide on the 59th Minute Method.
You veterans are probably tired of hearing about this, but it's very helpful to new players. The most effective way of finding good bargains for resale is the 59th Minute Method. This involves going to the search page, setting your Max Buy Now Price to the amount of money you have, selecting gold players only, and scrolling up the page until you reach a page where the cards are all at around 59 minutes and 30+ seconds remaining, but less than 60 minutes. Here, you need to keep scrolling back and forth through the pages to "refresh" and be on the lookout for good bargains. It's hard to say what price to buy which players for, as the prices are changing constantly. By just experimenting and seeing what works, you should get a pretty good idea of the market.
The reason this is so effective is that 1 hour is the default auction time, so the average player who just wants to offload a player for cheap will select a 1 hour auction, and you're right there to pick it up. Of course there's competition for the best deals, but all it requires is some fast clicking and a bit of luck.
Another very popular method is to quickly buy and sell contracts. This is especially useful for when you have less than 1000 coins. Just search for Gold contract cards and figure out the current going price that you can expect to sell contract cards for. Look for as cheap of cards as you can, obviously, but understand that you shouldn't expect to profit more than 50 coins. It's all about quantity here, work quickly and make as many transactions as you can. Once you get past around 5,000 coins, it's probably best to start using the 59th Minute Method, although certain methods work better for different people, so experiment.
Buy a bronze pack for 400 coins. Open the contents and pay attention to the consumables you receive. More often than not, you can sell your contracts, healing cards, fitness cards, and team talk cards for decent profit. Obviously you need to repeat this many times to see any huge profits, and you can't expect to profit off of every one. Just stay persistent, people will always need consumables. I like to play a match in between so that I'm making money from the match WHILE my cards sell so I'm not wasting time.
Although this method is sort of looked down upon by other players (who don't have enough money to do it) it's an extremely effective method that can really only be done when you have a LOT of coins or have found a very good player to do this with. This method buying out the entire stock of one player and reselling all of them for the same, higher price. This effectively changes the actual market price, if you control the supply. You should also have enough after buying the player that if anyone decides to sell your selected player for less, you can buy them out too and add them to your raised price. Although only really possible by the elite, extremely rich players, it is really something to strive for as if you can do it, you can earn a ridiculous amount of coins in a very short amount of time.
This isn't really a money making method, but this tip will save you nearly as much as you'd make with the above methods. People gamble their coins away with packs, hoping that it will finally be the moment when they'll pull out a Messi or Ronaldo and be set. Unfortunately, unless you are crazy lucky, then this is a surefire way to loose coins. I got some decent packs in the FIFA 09 Ultimate Team, but in FIFA 10 and 11, I hardly got anything. People waste real money buying packs, which is usually to no avail, so spending your coins on something that will almost definitely be worth half of what you spent is just insane. Make a promise to yourself now that you wont spend any coins or real money on packs, and I'm sure you'll greatly benefit in the long run.