FIFA: Beanie Babies in football form
An exploration into why we care
Something happened that haunts me. It’s so horrible that I had to fling myself down a rabbit hole to make sense of it.
And it happened on FC 24, a video game.
Its full name is EA Sports’ FC 24. And, if you’re out of the loop, that’s The Game Formerly Known as FIFA Before FIFA Got Too Money Hungry And Messed Up A Good Thing.
If you don’t know FC/FIFA, it’s a football simulation game. These days the football simulation game. It has no serious competitors, and just so happens to be one of my favourite games.
Cumulatively, I’ve probably spent more time on FIFA than any other title — especially, for some reason, in the long periods of my life where I didn’t give a damn about football.
That says something positive about the FC series. To me, it’s not a simple sports sim. It’s a fluid, action-filled, RPG-esque strategy game.
In which you button-mash to knock a ball about, yes, but let me be.
Despite all this, it’s been years since I played FIFA, long before the rebrand to EA Sports FC. No prizes for guessing where this is going.
A few weeks ago I was struck with an urge to get back on the FIFA train. Thankfully, as a Game Pass subscriber, I could download FC 24 for free. So I did. And I was having a great time until… the incident.
The mode I’m spending most time on is called Ultimate Team (or FUT). First launched in 2009, the game mode lets you build an all-star team of players and battle other users. The majority are current footballers, but there are also special editions of stars from bygone eras.
And this is where EA has been very clever.
You get players on FUT by opening packs. Quite literally, digital versions of the things you’d tear open at school for stickers or Pokémon cards. And how do you get these packs? Well, either by playing the game or, shockingly, shelling over some cold, hard cash to EA.
The thing is, Ultimate Team is barnloads of fun. You can advance quicker if you pay, sure, but you can pick up loads of decent players without paying anything. You just have to play.
And play I did. I pumped in hours, grinding and scrapping and hustling, before ending up with a team I was immensely proud of.
A tragic twist worthy of Shakespeare is coming though. And here it is. I fucked it.
I lost my entire team. Worst of all, there was only one person to blame, and it was the person I wanted to blame least of all: myself.
Ultimate Team has a game mode called SBC, or squad building challenges. As you play FUT, you receive the aforementioned digital packs of cards. The majority of these players won’t get into your first team, so just sit in your club doing nowt.
What SBC enables, in retrospect, is a way to swap those players you don’t use for the chance of something better.
This works by setting you a series of challenges. For example, it could ask for a squad with an average rating of 75 which includes at least three players from the same club. To complete it, you go into your club, select players to complete that challenge, and are then rewarded with a digital pack.
What I didn’t know is that when you do a squad building challenge, the players you put in that disappear from your team.
You can probably see where I’m going with this.
Without realising, I put almost my entire first team into the challenge. I went to play a game and panicked. My squad was ravished. Searching for a way to reverse it, all I found online were variants of, “what sort of idiot would do that, you’re on your own, chump.”
Distraught doesn’t do it justice. I was inconsolable. Torn to pieces — much to the confusion of my partner. She couldn’t really grasp why I was upset about digital players disappearing.
As I tried to explain the gravity of situation, I reflected on my reaction. What the hell was going on? Why did losing some pretend players on a silly little game hit me so hard?
It’s time to find out.
It was comforting to discover it wasn’t just me who would’ve been upset by what happened.
The scale of FC/FIFA and Ultimate Team is slightly overwhelming. It’s an unbelievable moneymaker for EA. Exact figures are hard to find, but, according to the company’s financial reports, it made $1.71 billion from in-game purchases across all its titles in Q3 FY24.
In terms of game sales, FC/FIFA is well ahead of the rest of EA’s titles, having shipped over 325 million copies in its lifetime. On top of this, the rise of subscription services like Game Pass means plenty of folks don’t directly buy the title, but still play.
Summing that up, EA makes almost two billion dollars every three months from in-game purchases, the lion’s share of which is, most likely, from FIFA. And most of that will be from Ultimate Team.
There’s more though. A thriving underground market has also sprung up around the game, with people spending big money on in-game coins that can be used to purchase players.
The graph below shows the average price for a million of these coins. While you can see some big variation, the average tends to hover between $40 and $70.
For context, some of the most sought-after players on Ultimate Team can be worth in the region of 15 million coins.
If we say the average cost of a million coins is $55, that means some people are paying upwards of $825 for a single player.
This seemed wild, so I went and had a look at some markets where these digital footballers are traded to see whether this was the case. And, well, it sure looks that way.
For someone on the periphery, this seems ludicrous. That’s so much money, enough for a low-key weekend away. Combined with the fact EA releases a new game every year — meaning if you buy a player in FC 25, you can’t transfer them to FC 26 — that’s hundreds of euros for, at most, 12 months of game time.
Let’s not forget that this is for one player. A single player, in a team of 11 with a subs bench of seven. If you’re buying one star, you’re probably going to want a few more to back them up.
It’s stupid, right? Real stupid. Spending cold, hard cash on digital items? So dumb.
But here’s the rub. I started researching with that mentality, but as I flicked through these players, I started talking to myself. “You know what?” I whispered, seductively into my own ear, “It would be pretty fun to have one of these players.”
Intellectually, it’s silly. I get it. But something inside me was attracted to the idea.
These FUT players don’t have any actual value, they’re digital models you can only use in a hyper-specific circumstance, trapped in the economy of a football game, but, somehow, they do. They’re valuable. They make people feel something. They’re worth actual money.
And I immediately knew what they reminded me of: Beanie Babies.
Humans assigning value to things that are fundamentally worthless has a long and storied history, and one of my favourite examples of this are Beanie Babies.
These plushies had a bizarre economic boom in the 1990s. While the stuffed toys cost about $5 in retail stores, some were being sold on eBay for $5,000.
In The Great Beanie Baby Bubble, the author, Zac Bissonnette, points out that the reason the plush toys got so popular is because Ty, the company that makes them, understood the power of rarity.
He discusses how, in 1995, some of Ty’s distributors suggested making Beanie Babies collectables, rather than toys.
By directing its sales force to tell retailers that certain pieces had been “retired”, [Ty] was now moving its plush animals into the category that was, at the time, a major driver of sales at the same gift shops where Beanie Babies were being sold as a toy.
With certain Beanie Babies having a limited number of models, and therefore being seen as valuable, collectors were able to drive prices up by buying and holding onto them.
This pushed the craze to strange heights. One family spent over $100,000 on Beanie Babies, seeing the toys as an investment that would pay dividends in the future.
Of course, this didn’t happen.
When the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, so did the Beanie Babies market. Their prices plummeted and, as they did, the market was flooded with toys from people who had stockpiled them trying to get some of the money they spent back. This drove their worth even lower.
Value, we can see, isn’t innate. It’s defined by the interaction between scarcity and how much people are willing to pay for that scarcity.
What we deem valuable is only valuable because we say so.
We agree, collectively, that an object, physical or digital, is worth something. This worth is intensified if there’s a limited amount of them — even if there’s no technical reason why that’s the case.
Like FUT players in FC 24.
There’s another piece to this puzzle though: we have to trust in the fact that scarcity exists. And in that trust is a beauty that gets to the core of humanity.
All the way back in the 1650s with Leviathan, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes discussed the importance of trust. This study condenses his views on the topic to this neat statement: “Trust is one of the principal forces which binds society together.”
What happened with Beanie Babies is the trust disappeared. People could no longer be assured that other people valued the toys as much as they did. Plushies went up for sale at prices that would’ve been unimaginable in the months before. The bottom fell out of the market, and so did the trust.
Is this what happened with me and FIFA?
Was losing my players like a mini market crash? And the fact the game allowed it to happen a betrayal of my trust in the system?
Partially, I guess, but that doesn’t quite cover it.
Mocking is easy, especially when people value things that the rest of the world doesn’t — but that’s not our jam here at The Rectangle.
I spoke about trust earlier, and I believe it has a closely tied companion: optimism.
Beanie Babies got so big because people believed they could improve their lives. You could position this as greed, as a pure desire for wealth, but I prefer framing it as the will to thrive, to grow beyond their stations.
Buying a Beanie Baby can be read as aspirational, a physical action people hoped would drive them toward a better life.
It was an act of optimism.
If people can spot some scarcity, get a bit of luck, maybe they can be rewarded for this endeavour. While it’s silly to remove the promise of monetary gain entirely (this is obviously a factor), a core aspect of valuing any sort of good, digital or otherwise, is optimism.
Whether it’s FIFA players or an air fryer, the value you assign to it something is linked to the idea it can improve your life. For my squad on FC 24, those footballers could’ve propelled me up the league, helped me win more victories, be a better player, and just enjoy myself.
This, really, is why losing them felt so bad — and why we create emotional attachments to digital items.
These footballers are scarce commodities, objects that were hard to get. Within the game itself, they were treasured for their attributes, while their value to me was tied to what I could achieve with them.
That’s the blueprint for why we value digital goods. And the reason why I still feel like shit and just want them back.
Did coming to this conclusion help? Is FIFA really just Beanie Babies? Have I intellectualised away the pain of losing my team?
Like hell I have.
It’s been weeks and I’m still not fully over it. But I couldn’t continue this way, so I made a decision.
The whole thing is funny.
Yeah, I lost something of value, something I care about, but I did so in one of the dumbest ways possible. That’s pretty funny.
All I can control is how I frame something.
Or by quitting FC 24 entirely and buying FC 25 during the Black Friday sales. I could also do that.
And, pals, would you believe? That’s exactly what I did. There was no need to write this newsletter at all.
(1) What a great piece of writing!
(2) See also: Taylor Swift snow-globes!