Economics in Fifa Ultimate Team

You find economic forces at work in the unlikeliest of places. One of my kids got me into playing Fifa 23, a fairly popular football (or soccer if you prefer) video game. One possibility in this video game is to play Ultimate Team, in which you build your own team that you gradually improve and with which you can play against the computer or random people somewhere in the world. The way to improve your team is by getting new and better players (player cards really) and there are essentially two ways to get those: through earning or buying packs of typically random player cards or through buying specific player cards directly. Fifa Ultimate Team has a currency, Fifa coins (in fact they have two currencies – but this is not important for our purposes here), and it has a market, in which you can buy and sell player cards from and to the other game participants. This market is as much subject to the logic of supply and demand as any market in the “real” world. It is perhaps even more fun and more insightful to study because it has much more pronounced and more severe demand and supply changes (or even shocks as some would call it) that can sometimes cause much more drastic price changes. In this post, I want to study some of those.

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