If I wanted to look through every single squad, every team, and every league on FIFA, it would take me hours. Sure, it can be tempting to do this when you’re trying to pick your next career mode save. But what if I told you there was an easy way to always get the best team with just four simple steps?

Here, I’ll be showing you my step-by-step guide to help you choose the ideal Career Mode save every single time. Of course, if you want to dominate FC 24’s Career Mode, you still need to prepare a large amount of FUT 24 Coins to upgrade your players.

Just like everyone else, I used to start dozens of saves. I would play one preseason game, then get bored with playing Career Mode. Since I started thinking a little more about what I actually wanted to do in my save rather than just picking the first one, I thought of my saves are now averaging closer to a full season.

Step 1: Choose Your Playing Location

The first thing you need to find out is the general area of the world you want to play in.

If you’re totally unsure, this could be a continent. But if you’re a bit more confident, then it could be a specific nation. Each continent on FIFA has different strengths and weaknesses.

Europe offers a fully licensed Cup Competitions with the Champions League, the Europa League, and the Conference League as well as having the biggest selection of leagues to choose from. The sheer amount of teams and leagues here means there’s always going to be multiple options that meet the criteria you’re setting.

North America only features one league, but the MLS is a totally unique experience. Annoyingly, they don’t actually have any Cup Competitions here and this can make the journey a little less fun.

South America also only has one licensed league, but you can play in Brazil if you don’t mind the fake players. You do get to play in a license continental Cup Competitions with teams from leagues that aren’t actually playable in Career Mode and it does provide a chance to explore football in a totally different culture.

Finally, we have Asia, which is probably the most underrated Career Mode continent. Asia includes an unlicensed continental competition and features a surprising amount of leagues, including the Saudi, Indian, and Korean leagues, which I barely ever see anyone doing saves in.

Hopefully, at least one of these regions sounds like exactly what you want in your next save. When you’ve decided on a continent, drill down and have a look at some of the nations inside it. Each nation has a different feel. They’ll play in different ways and they have different atmospheres. This can make neighboring countries feel unique on the pitch.

Belgium, Holland, and Germany are totally different in Career Mode, despite having very similar cultures as nations. Throughout this guide, I’ll give you some examples of the system working.

So, let’s say that I wanted a fairly long save. I think Europe has the deepest league structures on the game, so that’s the ideal location for this first step of our example.

Also Read: EA FC 24: 3 Most Promising And Exciting New Dribbling Techniques!

Step 2: Define Your Desired Save

The second and probably most crucial step in selecting the perfect Career Mode save is to decide on the type of save your most interested in doing.

You can generally categorize teams into one of these four main groups.

On FIFA, I’d say every single league has at least two teams who are capable of winning the championship who call these the Championship Contenders. These teams are instantly competing for league titles in cups in Season 1. They typically feature the best players and are considered the top teams in that nation. Bayern München, Ulsan Hyandai, and Inter Miami are examples of this kind of team.

The majority of leagues also have a selection of Historic Teams. These are the teams that might have experienced success in the past, but are not currently at their peak. They often have large fan bases, maybe even impressive stadiums. But they also usually have a squad of very average and very overpaid players. I would say that D.C. United, Everton, and Rosario Central are all Historic Fallen Giants.

The majority of the rest of the teams that aren’t Championship Contenders or Historic, I would call Middle Of the Road Teams. These teams are maybe a few strategic signings here and there from becoming title contenders. While they may have a couple of top players in their team, usually up front to be honest, they usually lack the overall quality usually in defense to compete for the title. Think of Crystal Palace, Al shabab, and Orlando City. That’s three good examples of teams that are fairly average, but are very close to being very good.

Finally, the most common type of team to use on FIFA is the Road To Glory Teams. This option usually is a longer term challenge where you have to rebuild an entire squad. Typically, Road to Glory saves involve a newly promoted team or someone who’s looking to establish themselves in a higher division. This generally includes the two or three worst teams in every single league.

If you like the sound of one of these four categories, then that’s great because now you’ve got a location and you’ve got a career path.

Let’s go back to our Europe save example. I said I want it to be long, so surely a Road To Glory Team would be ideal for us here. We’ll be taking over one of the worst teams in the nation that we pick.

Step 3: Determine Your Team’s Level

For step three of our system, we also need to determine what kind of team rank we want to be using.

If you’re someone that doesn’t enjoy using 50 rated players in the lowest leagues of island, you might be looking for a 3-star team here. If you want to be trophy hunting, you also want to be in a really bad league. You might be interested in trying to find a 1-star title contender.

Have a think about how good you’d like your starting point to be because this will easily narrow down the amount of teams and the amount of leagues you can use from the continent you’ve picked.

You’ll never ever get a 5-star Polish team in Career Mode or a 0.5-star French team, so this is the step that will filter out most of the teams in this system.

I could easily pick a 4-star team for my European Road to Glory save. There are loads of teams around that rating in Germany, Spain, England, and Italy. If I wanted a long Road To Glory though, I’m going to pick a one and a half star team, which means we’re going to have a team from League 2.

Step 4: Utilize SoFIFA for Team Search

Now, let’s round off our system. If you’re struggling to find the team with the in-game tools, you can have a quick search on SoFIFA.

You can easily search for teams with certain overall ratings and you can also check things out like the squad’s average age or the amount of potential that every single team has if that’s important to the kind of career mode you’re looking to do.

Back to our example. It looks like AFC Wimbledon could be the ideal save for me. It’s in Europe. They’re at the lowest level in the country and they’re the right star rating to match with everything that I’m looking for. They definitely seem like the perfect save for me to start.

So, let’s quickly run through two other examples of using this system just so that you understand exactly how it works.

I said Asia is fun, so let’s try and find a cool team from there. I fancy playing with a Historic Fallen Giant save, so that’s a team that’s around two and a half stars in Asia. Last year, we could have picked Guangzhou Evergrande who actually spent £1.7 billion on a new 100,000 seated stadium that they never finished. But they’ve actually been relegated on FIFA 24.

Suwon Bluewings is the team we probably go for then: four Korean titles, two Asian Champions Leagues between 1997 and 2008, but nothing since. They have a decent squad. Some of our players are in the 70s, but the majority are in the 60s, so they are actually going to be able to be fun inside Career Mode.

Let’s do one last example. How about a 3-star Middle Of The Road Team in South America? I want to use licensed clubs with real players, so we only have Argentina to choose from. This makes it super easy to see that we actually have several options here. I guess I’d have to just pick on the history kits and stadium I like the most.

We actually have some pretty big teams for a save in this kind of area. We have Newell’s Old Boys, Rosario Central, Banfield, Unión de Santa Fe...... There’s so many choices. So again, one of these is likely to be the perfect Career Mode save for me on my next go.

Hopefully, you can now understand how the system works that I use for every single save I do.