With EA FC 26 now available for players with early access and dropping for all players later this week, it’s time to start thinking about your Football Ultimate Team and how to go about building your winning side. One of the most important things to understand about team building in your FUT squad is chemistry, with players who have high chemistry with their teammates receiving boosts to their stats to perform at a higher level.
While much of the chemistry game is the same this year, that doesn’t mean everything is exactly as you’re used to, so understanding important tips for EA FC 26 chemistry and what’s new about chemistry in EA FC 26 can help you excel in your online games.
How Is A Player’s Chemistry Level Determined?
There are two important things to understand about chemistry in EA FC 26 FUT: how to get chemistry for your team and what benefits it provides. On the former, building team chemistry is all about fielding players with other players with whom they have connections in your squad. This means that having a player on the pitch with teammates who play on the same team, in the same league, or who share a nationality. Players who play for the men’s and women’s teams of the same club do count as club affiliations.
There are three levels of chemistry that a player can earn, meaning each player receives a score of 0, 1, 2, or 3 Diamonds, so your entire lineup can have between 0 and 33 as a chemistry rating. The higher a player’s chemistry level, the stronger the benefit they receive from their assigned chemistry style, with many different styles to choose from, each with its own advantages.
Players can receive chemistry rating in the following ways:
- Level 1: Fielding two players from the same club or country, or three players from the same league
- Level 2: Fielding four players from the same club, or five players from the same country or league
- Level 3: Fielding seven players from the same club, or eight players from the same country or league
Each player individually scores a chemistry rating and the corresponding bonuses from the most valuable tier they are in. So a player who’s part of a four-player group from one team and an eight-player group from the same country gets three chemistry, not five. Your manager can also contribute to players’ chemistry by counting as either a shared league or a nation connection.
What Does Chemistry Do For A Player In EA FC 26 FUT?
Chemistry applies boosts to your players’ stats in accordance with the level of chemistry the player is at. Boosts come in 3, 6, and 9 points, with each player receiving boosts to several attributes within a given category. In addition to considering how high you can get your chemistry when building your team, it’s important to think about which chemistry styles you are applying to each player.
The chemistry styles boost different attributes within the six primary categories:
- PAC (Pace)
- SHO (Shooting)
- PAS (Passing)
- DRI (Dribbling)
- DEF (Defending)
- PHY (Physicality)
What Is The Biggest Change To Chemistry In EA Sports FC 26?
The primary change to chemistry in EA FC 26 is the reduction of the impact of chemistry. While prior editions of the game had 4, 8, and 12-point bonuses for players based on their chemistry level, the reduction in this year’s game means that the new chemistry boosts are 25 percent less strong than in prior years.
While not a new change in this edition, players who don’t pick up every new version of the game, who last invested when the series was still called FIFA, will want to note that there was a change made from how chemistry used to work regarding other players on the pitch in FIFA 23. While older games only assessed chemistry in relation to neighboring players, requiring multiple shared elements to maximize, the move to total team counts makes it more possible to build a fully chemistry-maxed team without overly damaging your base ratings.
Is Team Chemistry Important In EA Sports FC FUT?
In short, yes. In a bit longer, yes, usually.
Boosting key attributes allows you to significantly improve the performance of your players because it allows you to pick the most important things they need to do for you and, in the case of Level 3 chemistry, boost them by nearly double digits. Improving a striker’s scoring that highly can change the pecking order on your team a good amount, allowing you to plug in a “worse” player with top chemistry boosts instead of a higher overall player who does not have chemistry in your team.
Where this can potentially become less necessary is in two situations. Early on, you may struggle to get enough players with decent chemistry links to generate strong boosts throughout your squad enough to justify leaving out a higher-rated player who otherwise does not mesh with your chemistry.
Another scenario where you might keep a lower-chemistry player is when they’re the lone outlier on an otherwise well-built team. For example, if you already have maximum chemistry — say 30 points — with the other ten players all boosting each other, an exceptional player who doesn’t fit the chemistry system can still outperform the best alternative that would receive a boost.
What Are Football Ultimate Team Chemistry Styles?
Chemistry styles are a key component of getting the most out of your high chemistry team. While not as critical when first starting to develop your team when the boosts are less powerful, it is not as essential, but once your team is well-aligned, the chemistry style decides how the bonus points your players earned are allocated. For more on the specific chemistry styles available, check out our guide on every chemistry style available in EA FC to identify what each does and how they can help you get the most out of your team.
How To Approach Assigning Chemistry Styles
There are two primary approaches you can take when selecting a chemistry style, and they both ultimately serve the same primary goal: making your player as effective as possible.
The first option is to take a strength your player has and look to make them unplayable with that skill set. Giving a fast player added legs to blow by defenders, or a strong defender even more ability to bully others off the ball, can make them a menace for opponents. Players on the other team will struggle to handle their boosted stats, allowing you to generate exploitable edges.
Alternatively, you can use your boost to fill the gap in a player’s skillset. Offensive players with high pace and killer finishing can feel impossible to deal with, so if you find yourself with a striker who has one of those skills but lags a bit in the other, you may opt to boost the lower stat, pairing their new solid-to-good skill with their already elite one to create an elite player.
Whichever approach you take with your style, the key is trying to make your players as well-suited to their specific role in your team as possible.
Team chemistry is a critical component of building a team in EA FC 26, and by mastering it you give yourself a big edge over the competition and can dominate in your Ultimate Team journey.
