One of the toughest Foundation-level Squad Building Challenges in FIFA 22 is Puzzle Master.
This SBC leaves a lot of people scratching their heads, but if you’re looking for how to complete the Puzzle Master SBC in FIFA 22 then you’ve come to the right place.
I’ll show you an example solution below with a list of the player names included too, but importantly I’ll break down why the solution works afterwards too.
Trust me, do yourself the favor of reading why it works below.
This will be extremely useful for finding cheaper solutions to this puzzle as the example players will be in hot demand and their prices may rise significantly as a result, making the SBC much less profitable — you don’t want that.
This is the fourth Squad Building Challenge in the League and Nations Hybrid category after The Challenger SBC, the Advanced SBC and the Fiendish SBC.
Puzzle Master SBC Solution for FIFA 22
To complete Puzzle Master in FIFA 22, you can use this team as an example:
The players included are:
- Sergio Asenjo (83)
- Demiral (77)
- Coates (83)
- Raul Albiol (82)
- Kostic (84)
- Rafinha (80)
- Gueye (82)
- Walcott (76)
- Tadic (84)
- Icardi (83)
- Armstrong (77)
However, it’s important to understand why this works. Some of these players might be expensive now that this solution has been revealed — as lots of people are looking for how to do Puzzle Master in FIFA 22, they all end up finding the same solution and buying up the players.
The good news is there are multiple players that you can switch out of this for lesser-known, less expensive players to make it more profitable. We’ll explain below.
There’s also one other important thing you need to know and we’ll get to that too.
What Does the Puzzle Master SBC Require?
To complete the FIFA 22 Puzzle Master, your squad will need:
- Exactly 9 nationalities
- Exactly 7 leagues
- A maximum of 3 players from one club
- A minimum squad rating of 82
- Minimum chemistry of 85
Now let’s break that down very quickly.
You need 9 different nationalities from 7 different leagues, but you still need 85 chemistry. This makes this challenge very, very hard.
In fact, it makes it impossible without one key thing — loyalty.
That’s right, completing the Puzzle Master SBC in FIFA 22 without loyalty is not possible, meaning that there isn’t a viable no loyalty Puzzle Master SBC solution.
If you’re not sure what loyalty is, or you want to know how to get loyalty faster, check out our guide to loyalty in FIFA 22.
The short and narrow of it is this: all of the players you submit in this must have either been obtained in a pack, or they must have played in 10 games for you after buying them from the transfer market. So what most people will do is build this team and then jump into 10 games of Squad Battles with them.
How to Complete Puzzle Master Cheaply
As I said a little earlier in this guide, many of the player prices in solution guides like this unintentionally drive the prices up.
Keen traders will keep an eye on these posts and then buy up as much of a player’s supply as they can, then list them at much higher prices. Also, increased demand just drives up prices even without trader involvement.
The good news is that there are a couple of ways you can make the Puzzle Master SBC cheaper.
Here’s the same example again, and let’s take a look at why it works:
To reverse-engineer how this works (and how all SBCs work) is to look at where you need green links, orange links, or maybe no links at all.
The first thing that stands out in this solution is that Demiral, the CB, requires no links at all. Every chemistry link around him is red, which means all we need to do is work out why he’s in the squad in the first place and then try to find an alternative player.
As Demiral was very expensive at the time of me completing this due to being in hot demand for this SBC, I did manage to find a different player that fits very easily. So why is he needed in this squad?
Well, he’s a Serie A player, the only one in the squad. And he’s Turkish, the only Turkish player in the squad. What this means is that he’s in for his unique league and unique nationality compared to the rest of this SBC team.
All I needed to do was look for a different player that was also unique. As I know from Demiral that Serie A is a unique league, I could stick with that as my league. Then, I needed to look at what nations hadn’t been used yet and one stood out straight away; Italy.
An Italian CB playing in Serie A? I knew immediately that these would be very easy to find and I just made sure to get a 77+ rated player so that the squad would still meet the required minimum. I used Daniele Rugani from Juventus:
There will be lots of other options you can use here too.
Another couple of positions we can look at is the inclusion of Armstrong and Walcott in the RM and RW positions. These are included because they both play for the same club in the Premier League.
This means we can substitute them for almost any other Premier League team that has two gold-rated right midfielders or right-wingers playing for them, assuming their ratings are 76 and 77 or higher.
I checked two other teams at random, Everton and West Ham, and they both have multiple options in this position, so if the Southampton options are over-priced at the time you go to complete this, you can find alternative options elsewhere fairly easily.
Once you’ve got the squad built, get your loyalty and then submit it. You should now have completed the League and Nations Hybrid FIFA 22 Puzzle Master SBC.
