After just half a season, your mediocre mid-table team could pillage the benches of Europe’s top clubs and stack their squad with players that would usually be far outside of their financial capability for the upcoming year. In FIFA 22 pre-contract signings are much rarer, but can be just as powerful when taking your team to the next level. This year, teams are much, much more proactive in tying down their wantaway talent before they leave for nothing. So while lots of fantastic players have just months left on their deals, most, if not pretty much all of them will likely sign on the dotted line before you even have a chance to tempt them away. However, even though the best pre-contract signings in FIFA 22 require a lot of luck, there will hopefully still be some interesting deals to strike in the first season. As for free transfers, they’re just as fickle and you will likely have to wait until you’re a few seasons deep before finding anyone worth snagging.
How to make pre-contract signings in FIFA 22
To contract a player to your club for the upcoming season without paying a transfer fee, you have to find a player whose contract expires at the end of the current season. Then once you reach the January transfer window, you can approach them from your Transfer Hub and directly offer them a new contract. You can tell which players have just a few months remaining on their contract, because when you search their name in the transfer tab, it will say “Contract Expiring in [however many] months” under their match fitness and morale. To identify which players have their deals up in the summer, go to your Global Transfer Network Scout Instructions in the Transfers tab of the Career Mode menu. Set Position, Attributes, and Age to Any, then reduce the Contract field to 0-1. This will give you an updating list of the players with less than a year on their deal. If you get players in there who don’t have the “Contract Expiring…” tag, it means their contract either expires in the following winter, or they renegotiated their terms after they were added to your list. Another thing you need to bear in mind, is that you can only sign players older than 23 on a pre-contract deal. In January, all you need to do is select the desired player in the Transfer Hub and go through the normal contract negotiations. However, while this mechanic was very overpowered in previous FIFA games, it seems to have been quite aggressively nerfed in FIFA 22. Most players with only a short time left on their deal seem to renegotiate well before the transfer window when you can approach them. This is especially true of improving players and can be a bit frustrating. The best thing to do is track all of the players you’re even slightly interested in, then cross your fingers and don’t look again until the first day of the January window. Then after Christmas, open up the transfer menu and see who’s still available. While most of the players you can sign on pre-contracts tend to be on the wrong side of 30, you can still add some 80+ rated players to your squad this way.
How to sign Free Agents in FIFA 22
Just like pre-contract signings are mostly re-signed by their current clubs, the best free agents get snapped up almost instantly. To get the top deals, you will need to search the free agents pool on literally the first day or first couple of days of any transfer window. If you see a player you like, you’re able to go through the normal contract negotiations without jumping through any more hoops. However, the real utility of the free agents pool isn’t to sign genuine players, but powerful regens FIFA populates your save with as older players retire. Once you’ve completed a couple of seasons, scour the free agents pool immediately on the first day of the new season to see if there are any good new players with good stats to be found - there are some real gems sometimes.
The best pre-contract signings in FIFA 22
Like we mentioned, it’s very likely that most of these players will have signed a new deal with their clubs by the time you’re allowed to approach them. But add any that you’re interested in to your transfer targets and you could get lucky - there are some great players potentially up for grabs.
The best free agents in FIFA 22
Again, as we said above, these players are often instantly re-assigned to new clubs, but it can be worth searching on the first day of your save if you need some extra talent. For more on who to sign in your Career Mode, here are our lists of the best wonderkids in FIFA 22, the best strikers in FIFA 22, and the best CAMs, CMs, and CDMs in FIFA 22.
