Squad Battles is such an easy way to build up your club in FIFA 22 Ultimate Team. Want to buy the best players and compete at the top? Then you need the weekly cash and packs infusion from Squad Battles rewards.
Put some time into Squad Battles each week and you get a bunch of extra packs to open, which goes a long way early on in the cycle
"Doing Squad Battles is like eating your vegetables in FIFA 22 Ultimate Team," says Ryan Pessoa. "It's probably not your favourite thing, but it is good for you! Put some time into Squad Battles each week and you get a bunch of extra packs to open, which goes a long way early on in the cycle. You can use Squad Battles to complete Objectives, too, so try to save them for when Objective Players are available, then get grinding!"
There were some amazing free player cards given out through objectives in the last cycle, so it's definitely worth putting the hours in to unlock those when they are available. Squad Battles is usually a critical part of Icon Swaps, too, when those go live closer to the end of the year, so knowing how to get the most out of the mode in the short term is helpful.
Squad Battles overview
Squad Battles is a single-player (or co-op) mode within FIFA 22 Ultimate Team that lets you play up to 40 matches against AI opponents each week, including a pair of special squads -- one based on a celebrity's picks, another based on the current Team of the Week. You can set the difficulty for each opposing squad before you play, and the harder the difficulty, the more points you earn. Points translate into coin and pack rewards, which are distributed every midnight on Sunday (UK time).
As well as electable difficulty levels, Squad Battle opponent teams are served up in groups of four. Each quartet includes a barely functional group of bronze misfits, who will usually be pretty easy to beat even on higher difficulty, and then two increasingly strong squads, capped with a full-chemistry team of meta players.
Beating the latter on high difficulty settings is inevitably quite a challenge, but that's the beauty of Squad Battles: you don't have to do so. You can just play the easier squads on high difficulty, and then either play the harder ones on lower settings -- or even just skip them altogether. Skipped matches do count towards your allocation of 40 games per week, but the chances are that you won't want to grind 40 Squad Battles matches anyway.
The best tactics for Squad Battles in FUT 22
The FIFA 22 meta is still taking shape, but beating the AI in Squad Battles doesn't seem all that different to previous games. First things first -- if you are learning the game, there's no shame in just playing against Semi-Pro or Professional opposition. Both should be pretty beatable using basic pass-and-move tactics. Holding the left bumper and passing to set your player off on a run, then slotting a through ball between the lines to complete the one-two, is a fairly straightforward way to outrun opposing teams on this difficulty setting.
However, if you're feeling confident about FIFA 22, we definitely recommend increasing the difficulty level all the way to Legendary. For years now, Legendary opponents have been quite passive at the beginning of a match, and tend to throw players forward when they go behind. This means that if you can breach the lines in the first 10 minutes or so, the chances are you can score several times quite quickly as the AI chases the game. There's usually no way back once you are three or four goals up, and the AI barely puts up a fight.
Simply playing the easiest Squad Battle opponent on Legendary for your 10 'refreshes' and winning eight out of ten of those matches would net you somewhere in the region of 22-25,000 points, which should be more than enough to yield good rewards.
Another thing to consider when playing Squad Battles is that unless you're attempting to complete all the matches, there isn't much point struggling when you fall behind. If you're trying a high-difficulty match and the opposing side scores, and/or you struggle to score within the first 20 minutes, you might as well just quit and try the next match. Saving yourself time and keeping your stress levels low is a good thing to do generally!
FUT 22 Squad Battles rewards breakdown
EA Sports has tweaked some of the rewards in Squad Battles for FIFA 22, so make sure you pay close attention to the tier you are in to make sure you're happy with the results. Some of the packs have changed and most of the coin rewards have been downgraded compared to last year. For our money, Gold 1 is a pretty decent return each week for relatively little time invested, but if you push on then you probably do want to strive for Elite 1 for that extra 12k.
Bronze 3 - Premium Loan Player Reward Pack
Bronze 2 - Gold Pack
Bronze 1 - 500 coins, 2x Gold Pack
Silver 3 - 1,000 coins, Premium Gold Pack, Gold Pack
Silver 2 - 2,000 coins, 2x Premium Gold Pack, Gold Pack
Silver 1 - 4,000 coins, 2x Jumbo Premium Gold Pack
Gold 3 - 5,000 coins, Jumbo Premium Gold Pack, Prime Mixed Players Pack
Gold 2 - 6,000 coins, Jumbo Premium Gold Pack, Prime Mixed Players Pack
Gold 1 - 8,000 coins, Prime Electrum Players Pack, Prime Mixed Players Pack, Jumbo Premium Gold Pack
Elite 3 - 8,000 coins, 2x Rare Electrum Players Pack, Prime Mixed Players Pack
Elite 2 - 14,000 coins, 2x Rare Electrum Players Pack, Premium Gold Players Pack
Elite 1 - 26,000 coins, 2x Rare Players Pack
Top 101-200 - 65,000 coins, Rare Players Pack, 2x Mega Pack
Top 41-100 - 65,000 coins, Jumbo Rare Players Pack, 2x Mega Pack
Top 21-40 - 75,000 coins, Jumbo Rare Players Pack, 2x Rare Players Pack
Top 2-20 - 87,500 coins, Ultimate Pack, 2x Rare Players Pack
No1 - 100,000 coins, 2x Ultimate Pack, 2x Rare Mega Pack
It's also worth remembering that reward tiers are updated constantly through the week, right up to the minute that Squad Battles rewards are handed out. So if you are playing on Wednesday and make it to Gold 1, you may find you have slumped to Gold 3 by Sunday night if you don't keep at it. You can review the previous week's points totals to get an idea of where each prize tier will settle, and you should also bear in mind that the number of points needed for each prize tier trends downwards over the course of the game cycle as players stop engaging with Squad Battles as much as they do in the early weeks.
Finally, remember to keep an eye on Objectives to see whether you can be earning bonus XP by performing certain actions in your Squad Battles match. Good luck!
