Iconic Football Legends Coming to FIFA 18 Ultimate Team on PS4

It’s that time of year again… A long couple of months have passed since that match in Cardiff where Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo showed the world just why he’s the FIFA 18 Cover Star, but the football season is finally back with us. We’ve been spending the summer break tracking transfers and studying squads, planning our perfect eleven for when we boot up Ultimate Team for the first time when FIFA 18 drops on September 29th.

Oh, and we’ve also been hard at work adding a load of awesome new features to FUT 18 to make it the best and most enjoyable one yet.

So let’s kick this blog off with the one I’m most excited about as a PlayStation player. As you may have heard, we’re bringing some of the most iconic players in the history of football to FUT 18 on PS4 as FUT Icons. Back in June we revealed the first five you’ll be able to add to your team when FIFA 18 drops on September 29th: “Il Fenomeno” Ronaldo Nazario; The King of Football, Pele; The original Argentine wizard Diego Maradona; The effortlessly brilliant Thierry Henry and the only goalkeeper to ever win the prestigious Ballon d’Or, Lev Yashin.

Not a bad start right? Well, how good does a squad featuring Peter Schmeichel in goal, Carles Puyol and Roberto Carlos at the back, Ruud Gullit, Jay-Jay Okocha (so good they named him twice), Patrick Vieira and Deco in midfield with Alessandro Del Piero and Michael Owen up top sound?

Strong, but missing a bit of that classic Brazilian flair in attack, right?

That’s an easy fix… legendary World Cup and two-time Ballon d’Or winner Ronaldinho is a FUT Icon too! If like me you spent hours in the garden trying (and failing) to replicate his famous elastico then Ronaldinho will be top of your transfer list when you start building your Ultimate Team next month. I can’t wait to see how my opponents cope with that move.

But that’s not all we have to announce about Icons today. Oh no! Each FUT Icon will have three different versions in-game with different ratings reflecting how their style and attributes evolved at three different points of their illustrious careers. Take Ronaldinho for example. He’ll have one item focused around his time at PSG and winning the World Cup in 2002, another based on 2010 and winning the title in his final year with AC Milan, and a final Prime version from that time where he was the best player on the planet in the mid-2000s.

Two of the three items for each Icon will be available in packs at launch, while the Prime version will be available a little later via limited-time packs and Squad Building Challenges.

All of that leads me on to some other great additions and improvements this year. We’re making Squad Building Challenges more accessible with some great unique items this year (such as those Prime Icons), adding a new Objectives feature that lets you earn great rewards every day, as well as a new single player Squad Battles mode that lets you compete against squads built by other players, celebrities and even pro footballers to work your way up a leaderboard and earn more rewards.

You can even get a head-start on the competition in FUT with three days early access when you pre-order the FIFA 18 Icons edition, which will also net you plenty of great FUT content including Cristiano Ronaldo and Ronaldo Nazario loan items. Because two Ronaldo’s are better than one!

We’ll have plenty more to reveal about FUT and FIFA 18 over the coming weeks too, so stay tuned!