EA FC Mobile: Beginner's Guide to Coins, Gems & Getting Started

EA Sports FC Mobile is the free, separate mobile version of the game, with its own currencies, modes and economy that work nothing like console FC 26. This guide explains how FC Mobile actually works, the three currencies and the numbers that matter (including a ranked table of the best free gem sources), and the beginner traps that cost new players the most, all without spending a penny.

How FC Mobile works

You start with a basic squad, play matches to earn coins and rewards, and improve your team by signing better players and using Training to level and rank them up. The core loop is play, earn, upgrade, repeat. The depth is in which modes you grind and how smartly you spend, which is exactly where most beginners go wrong.

The three currencies, and the one rule that saves you money

• Coins are the free, everyday currency with 100% predictable buying power: you spend them on the transfer market to buy the exact player you want. The catch beginners miss is the 10% sales tax on every market sale. Console FC 26 charges 5%, so do not assume it is the same; price about 10% above your break-even or the fee eats your profit.
• Gems are the premium currency you can still earn for free (see the table below). Use them for packs, draws and the Star Pass, and do not trickle them away.
• FC Points are the real-money currency. You never need them to progress, and EA says so directly. The only free way to earn any is your Daily Activities, and everything that matters is reachable with coins and gems.

The modes you will actually play (and where coins really come from)

One thing nearly every "coins per win" guide gets wrong: FC Mobile does not pay a fixed coin amount per match. A VS Attack game gives you progression (a win is +1 Star and +3 Bonus Points), and your real coin and gem payouts land on the weekly Division Rivals reward schedule, which runs on a roughly 28-day cycle.

• VS Attack (VSA): fast, chance-based attacking rounds. Quick progression in short bursts at a low stamina cost of one per match.
• Head to Head (H2H): full real-time matches, and the highest-paying weekly Rivals rewards of the three modes.
• Division Rivals: the long-term grind that feeds your weekly placement rewards. Your division and rank decide the payout, so climbing genuinely matters.
• Events: limited-time challenges with the best players and rewards. Always check what is live before you spend anything.

The exact weekly Rivals coin and gem amounts shift every season and by division, so read the current reward table in-game rather than trusting a fixed number online.

Best free gem sources, ranked

Gems are where free-to-play players win or lose, so here are the most reliable free sources, best first. Daily totals are approximate and rotate by season; the fixed values (the ad pack and the achievement total) are the ones you can always count on.

Source	Rough gems	How often
Daily Activities / Objectives	~250 to 360 (60 at 40 points, 100 at 60, 200 at 100)	Every day
Gems Ad Pack	100 (fixed)	Every 24h, for a 30-second ad
Daily Login	~200 on a standard day, more on milestones	Every day, resets 01:00 UTC
Achievement Quests	20,000 for completing them all	One time
Account-link quests	1,000 each (2,000 total)	One time

Do the daily objectives and the ad pack every single day, claim the 20,000-gem achievement haul early, and link your accounts for the easy 2,000. The Star Pass and event free tracks add more on top, but their totals change each season, so read them in-game.

The beginner traps that cost the most

• Dumping gems the moment you can afford a pack. The single most common mistake. Hoard toward a 15,000 to 20,000 gem war chest instead, then open during the first hour of a major promo (Team of the Year, Team of the Season, World's Game) when odds are boosted, and sell your pulls before supply floods the market.
• Funnelling coins into Store packs. Packs are a gamble that leave you with a weak bench and bad chemistry. Coins buy a guaranteed, chosen player on the market, which is almost always the better upgrade.
• Quick-selling cards. The recycle button returns just 100 coins. List even cheap cards on the market instead.
• Mispricing against the 10% tax. List at break-even and the fee turns a sale into a loss.

What to spend on first: put coins into specific market players that fit your formation, and save your gems for that boosted-odds promo window. For trading, flip underpriced cards (buy and instantly relist), stay in one overall-rating range while you learn the prices, and set a cut-loss price so you never panic-sell a dip.

The Star Pass and packs

The Star Pass is a 60-level, roughly 28-day pass. The free track is completable by every player and includes gems; the Premium track (around 999 Silver, roughly £8 to £10) adds extra coins, gems, FC Points and exclusive players. The gem totals change every season, so check the current pass in-game rather than assuming last season's numbers.

On pack odds: EA discloses every pack's real probabilities, but only in-game, on the "More Pack Info" screen for each pack. Always check it before you buy, and remember each open is independent, so past misses do not improve your next pull. Anyone quoting you exact pull percentages from a website is guessing.

The bottom line

FC Mobile rewards patience over spending. Do your dailies and the ad pack for free gems, climb Division Rivals for your weekly coins, buy specific players on the market instead of gambling on packs, and bank your gems for boosted-odds promos. It is a genuinely deep free game once it clicks. For more, see our FC Mobile section, and if you also play the console game, our Ultimate Team guides cover that side, just remember it is a separate game with its own economy.

How we built this: the durable mechanics here (the 10% market tax, the 100-gem daily ad pack, the 20,000-gem achievement total, the 60-level Star Pass, FC Points not being required) are confirmed across EA's help pages and the main FC Mobile guide sites. Verified June 2026. FC Mobile is a live game, so season and event values (weekly Rivals payouts, Star Pass gem totals, pack contents) change constantly, so always confirm the current numbers in-app.