Today producer Josh Looman announced some changes to the way Madden Ultimate Team handles player contracts.  Check out his forum post below and hit this thread on the EA Forums for any feedback/questions you have on the changes.

I wanted to let you guys know that we’ve made a major change to how contracts work in online games to hopefully combat problems with disconnects and quitters. Our team was going to integrate this solely for the next version of Madden Ultimate Team since it took a lot of time and effort to change, but everyone decided it was something that needed to be implemented now. Here’s the change: Yesterday, if you were playing an online head to head game and you were disconnected at the start of the end or at any point prior to the end of the game, all of your starters lost one game off of their contracts. Today, we moved the contract decrementing process to the end of the game. When you receive your coins for losing or winning, contracts are removed at that point and they are only removed for players that play a certain amount of downs in the game. The game stores how many downs you’ve played and only decrements contracts for players that have exceeded that value at the end of the game. What this means is that if you are quit on or disconnect prior to the end of the game, you will not lose any contracts for any of your players. The downside? There will be no penalty for quitters now in terms of contracts so you may see more of that happening. We weighed the consequences of both and agreed that helping out the victims of the quitting and disconnects was more important to us. Playing vs. the CPU stays the same as it was before, mainly because there haven’t been a lot of complaints for those games and because of exploits in 1-3 minute quarter games. I want to thank the dev team for taking time out of their new schedules to implement this change. They really fought to make this experience better for you guys. BTW…the popup in-game will still say that you will lose contracts if you quit but changing that would have required a massive amount of work, so we left it in. Just disregard it. Let me know if you have any questions.