The slickness also means you can concentrate on important stuff, like building a squad with amazing chemistry. Chemistry is the secret sauce that makes Ultimate Team so tasty. The idea is that players in your squad don't have to buy fifa coins from the same league, country or club, but there needs to be a strong enough connection between enough of them that their chemistry - individually and collectively - is more or less maxed out, otherwise they misplace passes during games or you find them out of position in the moments that matter. It's not an exact science, but a good rule is that you are better off with a high-chemistry team of limited players than a low-chemistry team of superstars, and as you can imagine, cobbling an effective unit together - especially a hybrid drawing on entertaining players from different leagues and nations - is a little... moreish.
One historical issue with Ultimate Team has been the difficulty of anticipating how well certain players would combine without buying them first, which was rarely practical, and over the years this has given rise to well-maintained fan sites like Futhead and Futwiz, where players can build theoretical teams and explore the game's database in search of hidden gems. EA supports these sites, but this year Ultimate Team tries to bring a bit of that theorycrafting metagame into FIFA 15 itself with the addition of Concept Squads.
Concept Squads makes it easy to stitch conceptual teams together, filtering players by things like position, nationality and home league and then letting you examine chemistry links to see what works. You can't play any matches with a concept squad (there seems to be a bug at the moment letting a few people do this - expect it to be fixed), but as you gather funds you can start searching the transfer market for the players you covet, gradually adding them until your dream team is complete.
Don't delete your Futhead and Futwiz bookmarks just yet, though, because there are a few drawbacks. The feature currently lacks the immediacy and at-a-glance qualities of those sites and doesn't give you an insight into the more detailed in-game stats of the players, only the ones on the face of the card, so there's no way to identify, say, the best free-kick takers in the game without searching online or buying and testing players. It's also a single-screen experience, whereas I often want to browse players on my phone or laptop while I play - something you can't even do with the companion apps, which don't let you log in on more than one device at once.
Xbox players can also include FUT Legends in their squads, although if the availability and pricing of these in last year's game was anything to go by, they will remain out of reach for the majority.
FIFA 14 Coins PS4 is a semi-useful feature, then, but the addition of loan signings is genuinely ace. One of Ultimate Team's perennial issues is that it's a trudge to start with as you play a succession of games with a team full of journeymen before you can buy anyone decent. Loan players give you something fun to play with while you accumulate match earnings - Leo Messi is provided for five matches if you buy the Ultimate Team Edition of FIFA 15, while players with existing EA Sports Football Club experience points can unlock players like Gareth Bale and James Rodriguez from the Football Club Catalogue. Considering that I played hundreds of matches and spent embarrassing amounts of money chasing coins in FIFA 14 and never got within a mile of Messi or Bale, the novelty of having them in my team at all was quite something. (Ronaldo isn't available on loan, sadly.)