FC 27's Ultimate Team Overhaul Detailed: FUT Gallery, Score-Based SBCs and a Calmer Power Curve

Every year EA promises Ultimate Team is changing, and most years that means a new coat of paint. This time the patch notes read differently. The official FUT deep dive for EA Sports FC 27, published on the EA Sports FC site on August 2, describes structural changes to how collecting, squad building and the season-long power curve actually work, ahead of the game's September 18 launch on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2.

Video: EA SPORTS FC on YouTube

FUT Gallery finally gives your discards a purpose

The headline addition is FUT Gallery, a collection system that records most player items passing through your club, whether they came from packs, the transfer market, objectives or SBC rewards. Items slot into themed sets built around nations, leagues, clubs and campaigns, and here is the part that matters: an item keeps contributing to its set even after it leaves your active club. Sending a walkout into an SBC no longer erases it from your history.

Completing sets raises an overall Gallery level that unlocks cosmetics, tokens and bonuses, and on every platform there is a 3D Gallery Hub where your collection is displayed as physical objects. Feeding into all of this are new holographic items, rare variants of special cards that come in two tiers, a regular animated foil version and a Pristine version with a stylized player name. They carry the same in-match attributes as the standard card but score higher in Gallery sets, so the chase is cosmetic and collectible rather than pay-to-win. We can see the Pokemon card DNA from a mile away, and honestly, it fits this mode.

SBCs drop the squad math, and the endgame gets toned down

The other big structural change hits squad building challenges. Most SBCs abandon chemistry, position and rating requirements in favor of a score target: every item you submit is worth points, you keep submitting until you hit the number, duplicates count, and partial progress saves. Traditional full-squad puzzles remain for challenge content, but the grindy day-to-day SBCs should get dramatically less fiddly. Evolutions also grow branching Pathways, so one card can be built toward dribbling or defending rather than following a single fixed track, with a chain preview showing where each route leads before you commit.

Just as notable is what EA is pulling back. Special items are capped at three PlayStyle+ instead of five, attribute inflation across the season is deliberately smaller, and roughly five fewer weeks of the year will feature campaign squads. After the Mbappe cover reveal in July leaned on spectacle, this is the quieter, wonkier half of the pitch, and it is aimed squarely at players who felt last year's endgame turned every match into a sprint between identical 99-rated squads.

Whether the tuning survives contact with FC 27's live economy is the real question, and it is fair to remember this is also the first FC built under EA's new private ownership following the 55 billion dollar buyout that closes this week. On paper, though, this is the most interesting set of Ultimate Team changes we have covered in years. Collectors get a reason to keep cards, casuals get SBCs that respect their time, and the power curve gets a leash. We will believe the leash holds when we see October's promo cards.