Squad Battles is a single-player mode within FIFA 23’s Ultimate Team mode. In Squad Battles you play against other human players’ Ultimate Team squads, but they’re controlled by AI at the difficulty level of your choosing. The higher the difficulty, the more points you earn, and the more points you earn, the higher your ranking at the end of the week, and ranking is what determines your end-of-week rewards.
Related: When does World Cup Mode come to FIFA 23?
How to change Squad Battles time in FIFA 23
During the FIFA 23 beta in August 2022, the length of every Squad Battles match was fixed at 3 minutes per half, and many players were very happy with this, because it meant Squad Battles was an easy, and very quick, way to earn Coins and other rewards in Ultimate Team. So, many players were assuming that this would be a permanent change that would also apply to the full release of FIFA 23, but that isn’t the case.
You cannot change the half length of Squad Battles or of any Ultimate Team match type. If you change the half length to 3 minutes in the main Game Settings, this only applies to matches played outside of Ultimate Team. The half length of all Squad Battles games is 6 minutes.
Why can’t you change half length in Ultimate Team?
Ultimate Team is a complex game mode with a complex economy. The pacing of rewards has to be very finely balanced in Ultimate Team, especially as some players pay real money to speed up their progress. So, EA Sports can’t afford to risk upsetting that balance by making the mode too customizable.
The half length for Squad Battles was presumably set to 3 minutes during the beta because the beta only ran for a limited time, and EA Sports wanted players to make faster progress during that time in order to be able to gather more meaningful data.
