FIFA 09 Ultimate Team, Football Academy

Yeah, you could, but there's such a vast array of players in the game that you're very unlikely to come up against the same team. We don't really know what the best team in the game is, because there are so many factors involved.

Best player? Ooh, probably the very typical ones of... the Liverpool fan next to me just said Steven Gerard! I'd say Robinho because I'm a [Manchester] City fan [laughs]. But it would probably be the Ronaldos or Kakas.

You always increase stats with training but to balance that out - because we don't want lots of 99 players on every team - there's always a negative. For example: if you have a speed training of plus-six, then there will be a bit of an offset - maybe your dribbling goes down by one. It's a balancing act. But no, the player attributes don't degrade.

The starter pack has 20 cards, the fundamentals you need to get going. That will be a starter squad, which is made up of predominantly bronze players, plus a home kit, an away kit, a training arena, a stadium, that kind of stuff. But it gives you the opportunity to grow it into your ultimate team.

It depends on how much you play and obviously micro-transactions in as well. And then there's the trading, which is a bit of a wildcard. If you play a good game you can earn enough to buy a bronze card pack after every match. Silver packs probably take four games, and then gold roughly every eight. But what we wanted to ensure was that you don't get a starting eleven of great players and then sit back and say, "I'm done". One thing each player has is a contract value with a starting value of about eight or ten, and every time they play their contract will be reduced by one. If you bench him it doesn't reduce, so you can always rest players if they're running low on contract. One of the cards within the community is the contract-increasing card, so you'll normally have to buy a couple of bronze players while saving for gold just to keep your team ticking along.

What we're finding in testing is a lot of people have an A team and a B team and use the B team to earn more coins, but when they go into the online tournaments, or when there's a big game, then they'll bring in their A team. So there's a very strategic element as to who you play, and when.

It's based on the FIFA database to start with but that's not affected by the Live Seasons. It would be a little strange to train a guy up and then find, because he'd had a bad day in real-life, that his stats had dropped down.

We wanted to add offline because not everybody wants to play online. So there's 36 tournaments in all: 18 online and 18 offline. And then there's also online league games and offline league games that feed into the leaderboards.

Where we take this... we'll obviously monitor the forums and feedback. It's something we intend to keep taking forward. In terms of what format: that's yet to be determined. So yes, it's kind of an experiment in that sense.

If you know about football then it's definitely designed for you; the game is for football fans. It's kind of aimed at kids and their dads, mainly, but at the same time people like myself, yourself; there's still a lot in there for people that are football fans. In terms of building up your IQ: there's a lot of different types of games in there, not just based around tactics - there's a lot of stuff based around general knowledge of football as well.

Yes. There's a couple of cores to the experience. The biggest core to the experience is improving your knowledge on and off the pitch. Off the pitch is your mini-games, building your football IQ, which is a bit like Brain Training and has a score, and you can compare that with others to see how good you are. That actually then feeds into the rest of the game, where you're trying to build a dream team by collecting cards of players, as your IQ affects your chemistry, the idea being that the more you know, the more the players will respect you.

But also as you play the mini-games you're learning formations and which players are best for what. One of the mini-games, for example, is pick your best eleven from the players that come up.