FIFA 21: How To Make Transfers More Realistic

FIFA 21 is a game where you can snap up wonderkids for next to nothing, hone their talents and then sell them on for just an absurd amount of profit. You can quite easily game the system in Career Mode, so much so that you can turn into a financial powerhouse in just a few smart transfers. But what if you want more realism from your transfers in FIFA 21?

EA have adopted a more Football Manager-esque approach to Career this year, which means that you can make transfers more realistically reflect the real world of football if you so wish. While it may be harder to succeed, it’s certainly more immersive than paying just a few million euros for Fabio Silva.

When starting a new Career save, you are presented with a load of options, such as a transfer window from the off and which currency you want to use. For FIFA 21, you can now change transfer realism by switching the negotiation strictness option from loose to strict.

This makes clubs want more money and clauses than normal, meaning that you will need to diligently negotiate. Once a fee has agreed, even negotiations with players become more complex. On top of that, players at somewhere like Real Madrid are much, much less likely to move to clubs in the lower half of the table or those with lower reputations.

While playing on strict negotiations, you will not be able to sign players who have just recently moved, such as Fabio Silva, who only signed for Wolves in the 20/21 summer transfer window.

For comparison, we were able to sign Silva immediately on loose negotiation strictness and only for €5 million, which is kind of game-breaking.

An important thing to note: while this option will make your own transfers more realistic, it won’t stop some of the crazy transfers the AI completes during every window, such as Joe Gomez to Barcelona for €70 million.

FIFA 21 is available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. A Legacy Edition is also available for Switch.