FIFA 19 leak reveals EA has finally demystified FUT chemistry in-game

Anyone's who's fussed with FIFA Ultimate Team will know how important chemistry is to the performance of your players.

Apply special chemistry cards to your players and you'll increase their statistics. In 2016, EA Sports revealed the numbers behind chemistry, publishing a table outlining the attribute values a player with 100/10 chemistry receive, broken down by chemistry style.

That's easy to understand, but the problem has always been the game itself did not show the player exactly how chemistry boosted player stats. All you could see were boosts to bundled stats such as "shooting", not boosts to actual attributes within the bundled stat. So, you'd know your player had a boost to shooting, but you wouldn't know which exact attribute, such as Finishing or Long Shots, were boosted. That meant it wasn't clear, for example, whether you'd want the Sniper or Finisher chemistry style applied to your striker.

FIFA players instead turned to third-party websites such as futbin to find out unofficial stats boosts from chemistry, which was hardly convenient. Now, according to a leaked screenshot from an embargoed FIFA 19 invite-only beta by redditor Legeo3, we now know EA Sports has added stats boosts from chemistry.

The image shows exactly how Southampton striker Charlie Austin's stats are boosted by the basic chemistry style (the basic chemistry style is automatically applied to all players which don't come pre-loaded with a chemistry style of their own). For example, we can see Austin's sprint speed is boosted five points from 69 to 74. Useful!

While this information perhaps should have been in FIFA years ago, it's welcome to see it finally arrive in FIFA 19, and it looks like it's going down well among fans. I've always found FIFA's chemistry system a somewhat dark art, so I'm delighted to see it demystified somewhat for this year's game.