What sniping is
Most cards on the transfer market are listed around their going price. Now and then someone lists one well under it, to sell quickly or by mistake, and the first person to find that listing gets the bargain. Sniping is running the same search over and over with a price cap, so the only results are bargains, and buying the moment one appears.
The profit comes when you sell the card on at its normal price, less the 5% EA keeps from every sale.
Before you start
- The FC 27 Web App, signed in, with the transfer market open to you.
- Enough coins to buy the card at your max buy.
- Room on your transfer list. Everything you buy is listed from there, and a full transfer list stops you listing.
Step by step
1. Choose a card
Pick a card that's listed often, with room for a profit after tax, and that isn't the one everyone else is sniping. What makes a sniping filter good goes through each of these.
2. Find its price
Search the card with a high Max Buy Now and lower it a step at a time until results stop appearing. The lowest price that still shows a listing is what the card is selling for right now. EA lists results by time left, not by price, so lowering the cap is the quickest way to find the cheapest.
3. Work out your max buy
Take the sell price, keep 95% of it for EA's tax, and take off the profit you want, rounding down to EA's price step. A card selling for 20,000 coins pays you 19,000 after tax, so for a 1,000-coin profit your max buy is 18,000. EA's price steps are listed here.
4. Set up the search
Open Transfers, then Search the Transfer Market. Type the player's name and choose the card, then set Max Buy Now to your max buy.
5. Search, and keep searching
Most searches find nothing: that's normal. Go back, change the Min Bid Price by one step and search again. The Web App keeps recent search results, so the exact same search can show you a page it already has, and a small change makes every search a new one. Keep a steady pace, though (see below).
6. Buy it straight away
When a card appears, it's under your price, so select it and use Buy Now without waiting. Other snipers are searching for the same listing. If one got there first, EA tells you the item is no longer available: carry on searching.
7. List it
A card you've bought waits with your unassigned items until you list it. Choose List on Transfer Market, set the Buy Now Price to the card's going price and the Start Price a step or more below it, pick a duration and list it. EA offers 1, 3, 6, 12, 24 or 72 hours.
A card that doesn't sell comes back to your transfer list as expired, ready to relist at the same prices or new ones.
Search at a pace EA won't block
Every search is a request to EA. Search too often in a short time and EA can stop answering your searches for a while, a temporary block players call a soft ban, or ask you to complete a captcha before you carry on.
Leave several seconds between searches, take breaks, and stop when EA starts refusing searches rather than pushing on. The safety page has more on keeping an account healthy.
What a bot does differently
Every step above is repetitive, which is why people automate it. FUTSplash works through the same steps inside the Web App you're already signed in to:
- Chooses the card: live filters rebuilt from market prices every 10 minutes, ranked by expected profit after tax and picked to suit your balance.
- Finds the price: walks the price down to the cheapest real listing before a filter runs, and skips a filter whose price looks like a spike.
- Sets the max buy: so the sale clears EA's 5% tax and your minimum profit, rounded to EA's price steps.
- Searches: changes the minimum prices on every search, with randomised delays between searches in Safe, Normal or Turbo.
- Buys: only a listing that's the card and version it searched for, under the max buy and still leaving your minimum profit.
- Lists: each card straight away, for an hour, with the Buy Now at the listing price and the start price a step below.
- Paces itself: meters show your searches over the last hour, three hours and day against a budget, with scheduled breaks, and a run stops when EA signals a problem.
Every new run starts as a dry run, which searches and price-checks for real but never buys, so you can watch what it would do first. See everything the sniping bot does
A word on EA's rules
Sniping by hand is ordinary use of the transfer market. Automating it is different: EA does not permit third-party automation of the Web App, and any automated trading carries a risk of restrictions on your account. Read how FUTSplash keeps your usage moderate.