FIFA 22 Ultimate Team custom tactics: Defensive Style, Build Up Play, Chance Creation, Width & Depth slider guide
Having an amazing team in FIFA 22’s Ultimate Team or Career Mode is all well and good, but you need the right custom tactics to give it cohesion. Our guide covers attacking and defending styles, as well as custom slider tips too.
One of the beautiful things about FIFA 22 is the level of customization you have for your line-ups, custom tactics, instructions, and roles in Ultimate Team, Career Mode, and more.
At the same time, this creates countless dilemmas and leaves you with endless headaches regarding the best ways to fulfill your team’s potential.
We’re here to hopefully help you and put to bed some of those doubts with our FIFA 22 custom tactics in-depth guide.
- What are custom tactics in FIFA 22?
- Best FIFA 22 custom tactics for Ultimate Team & Career Mode
- Best FIFA 22 Defence custom tactics
- Best FIFA 22 Offence custom tactics
What are custom tactics in FIFA 22?
When you go to your team sheet/team selection, you’ll be able to choose your team, the formation, and assign different roles such as penalty kick taker. But changing your custom tactics dictates how your team will play.
- Read More: FIFA 22 Ultimate Team review: A future star
If left untouched, then the movement of your players and the way they behave will be in the hands of the default settings put in place by EA.
Custom tactics
Your decisions will affect how your team attacks and defends during 90+ minutes.
These are the settings you can tinker with to increase and decrease the speed of your play, where your team will be situated on the pitch, and alter how many players you commit to certain scenarios:
Defense
- Defensive Style
- Width
- Depth
Offense
- Build Up Play
- Chance Creation
- Width
- Players in box
- Corners
- Free Kicks
Best FIFA 22 custom tactics for Ultimate Team & Career Mode
Naturally, everyone has a different way they like to play and one tactic could suit the frenetic style of play, yet contradict a more methodical way of playing FIFA 22.
For example, a player that likes to play a simple 4-3-3 might prefer a faster build-up to get the ball out wide and get the strikers surging towards the opposition box quicker.
Whereas someone who loves their possession will want the team to keep a hold of the ball as long as possible to wear their competitor down.
Here are our best custom tactics and instructions to use for FIFA 22’s different game modes: namely Ultimate Team and Career Mode.
Best FIFA 22 Defence custom tactics
- Defensive Style: Pressure After Possession Loss
- Width: 55
- Depth: 70
Letting your opponent voluntarily come to you is never ideal in FIFA unless you’re down to 10 men. So the Pressure Ater Possession Lost method will make your teammates ball chase for 7 seconds after losing it, giving you ample opportunity to retrieve it.
If your defense isn’t strong or you don’t feel confident in your defending, then this is the perfect chance to try and avoid that. For more capable players, it will make turnovers less of a pain and allow for a lot of your own quick-fire counter-attacks.
Whether you have a narrow diamond formation with less width or play a formation with wingers / wing-backs to cover the sides, 55 width is a nice balanced number. Technical midfielders shouldn’t be able to ping their way through your midfield, and pacey wingers should still be able to meet some opposition in the form of your midfielders.
The thought of having a line this high may terrify some, but better intelligence in defenders and slightly slower gameplay with less of an emphasis on pace this year should allay any fear over setting it to 70.
Whether it’s the A.I or human players, as long as you have a decent bit of pace in your CB’s, 65-70 + should do the trick, then this will allow you to press the other team, give them less room to play, and get you the ball back quicker.
Best FIFA 22 Offence custom tactics
- Build Up Play: Fast Build Up
- Chance Creation: Direct Passing
- Width: 55
- Players in box: 7
- Corners: 3
- Free Kicks: 3
From the moment the ball is at the feet of one of your players, your team will look to immediately get forward and attack quickly.
With FIFA 22 trying to cut down on pace and high-scoring games, edgy games might need that spark of inspiration or a speedy attack that catches the other team unaware.
Fast Build Up will give you many options going forward and the greater sense of urgency will increase your chances of scoring.
Given that we’re already trying to make the team move at one hundred million miles an hour, it’s best to also keep a hint of calm as well.
Forward Runs becomes counter-productive when it’s already naturally a part of Fast Build Up, whereas Direct Passing shines a spotlight more on your rampaging forwards – we play with two strikers, and it creates a whole range of different possibilities.
Again, 55 width works as we find it’s best to keep these kinds of stats quite neutral. Regardless of how many is in the middle of the park or out wide, keeping a healthy balance means you’ll see some creativity out wide, and your midfielders, or wingers, can make a beeline into the box.
Another stat that may depend on the formation you opt for, but unless you’re playing a very negative formation with only one striker and wide midfielders as opposed to wingers, then 7 is a healthy number.
This will allow your strikers, a CAM, and maybe a wide player to be present for a cross, or be there to cause panic for the defending team, allowing you to ping some passes around and work an opening for a tap-in.
2 seems to provide you with not enough players for corners, and 4 is just a tad too much and can lead to some troublesome counter-attacks. 3 seems to be a solid number that offers enough presence in the box to ask questions.
Work on your corner routines in training and you should find that you only need the same CB or Striker on the end of a corner to pick up some easy goals.
Similar to the corner scenario, even though pace isn’t a big item on the agenda in FIFA 22, we still don’t want a 85-90 pace player running at an exposed defense with half a pitch, or more, to run into.
Unless you’re extremely confident in your set-piece-taking methods, we think it’s best to play it safe with 3.
As with all guides of a subjective nature, we recommend you take our advice and tips on board and see which of them work for you. They’re completely effective against Barca-like A.I, and can help you move up the divisions in Rivals for Ultimate Team!
Also, check out our guides on the best Goalkeepers, Defenders, Midfielders, Wingers, and Strikers you can buy in FIFA 22 Ultimate Team!
Image Credit: EA Sports