It’s time for EA to admit defeat. Since its debut in 1993, FIFA has tried and tried again to port the beautiful game from pitch to pixel. In FIFA 19, that dream of a perfect simulation is closer than ever before. The ball physics; the balance of pace and power; Cristiano Ronaldo’s equine prance; Eden Hazard’s improbably strong backside, it’s got it all. But FIFA still isn’t football. It’s anything but.
You know the drill: sit on sofa, play FIFA, find yourself pitted against an endless wave of opponents who sprint at you from every conceivable direction. Repeat. You, an intellectual, would like to recreate the elegant flow of real football. Everyone else just wants to run at you. Lots. Even offline – with a good friend sat beside you on the sofa – an ordinary, reasonable human being is transformed into a rapacious aggressor, knuckles whitening around the sprint trigger as they send Romelu Lukaku hurtling towards your centre back in an improbable display of the high press. You look down at your own thumbs and discover, to your horror, that you too are pushing your players into a constant, lung-exploding barrage of sprints.
How has this happened? How has FIFA, that shining beacon of sporting simulation, become so strangely divorced from actual football? Look no further than Jürgen Klopp. Or David Platt.
In 2011, Klopp led Borussia Dortmund to the Bundesliga title. It was, in some respects, the birth of the beautiful, breathless, high press – or, as it’s come to be known, gegenpressing. It’s the frantic art of counter-pressing, Klopp’s heavy metal answer to Pep Guardiola’s glorious concerto. To the untrained eye, it looks like a frenzied assault on the ball. Of course, it is anything but. Unless you’re playing FIFA.
Since a marauding David Platt adorned its first cover a quarter of a century ago, FIFA has always been a game built for gegenpressing. The belligerent anti-football of Joe Kinnear was too boring and bruising to put into code; the technical genius of Alex Ferguson’s Man United was too hard to replicate in pixels. But breathless, frantic pressing was the perfect tactical fit for a video game. And so it has remained. Klopp popularised the high press, but FIFA invented it.
The only problem? In FIFA, the meticulous planning behind a successful high press is reduced to a senseless flaying of vertical limbs. It’s joyous and horrendous in equal measure. But it isn’t football. It’s FIFAball – a breathless, basketball-inspired battle of sprint and counter-sprint, of lunge and counter-lunge. It’s like Man City on speed, a drunken Liverpool stuck on fast-forward. To the skilled opponent, the frantic, ill-targeted press can be escaped. A well-timed slight of thumb, a lofted through ball, a deft feint. But, against the ceaseless energy of virtual players flogged to sprint and harry for eternity, the principles of football collapse.
Back in 2007, Pro Evolution Soccer was the pinnacle of football simulation. FIFA 07, for all its authenticity and official licenses, was a cheap and cheerful thrill-fest in which Fernando Torres could run faster than light itself and score from almost any angle or distance. Since then, FIFA has mellowed. Pace and power are now better balanced, touch and control are more elusive and satisfying – this is, without a doubt, the most faithful recreation of football to ever grace a games console. But it’s also a nightmare. And nearly everyone still plays it the same way.
Condensing down a 90 minute game into an eight-minute highlight reel does strange things. Nobody, and you have to be honest with yourself here, plays FIFA like real football. This is an alternate footballing universe in which Tony Pulis does not exist and Mamadou Sakho has full control of his limbs. If FIFA really wanted to replicate football then it would forcibly disable Paul Pogba for vast swathes of playing time. It doesn't. Pogba is consistently brilliant in FIFA. Which is wrong.
So to hell with realism, it’s time to throw away the rulebook and admit defeat in the pointless pursuit of simulation perfection.
And, thankfully, FIFA 19 does exactly that. The new kick-off mode is a wonderful, belated realisation of pure FIFAball. Sure, you can play your Classic Match with its rules and its realism. Or you can try out Survival, in which a player is ejected from the game each time a team scores. Or Long Range, where all goals from outside the area count double.
Then there’s First to 2, where the clock is locked to 20-minute halves, with the first side to score two goals declared the winner. It’s even more stupid than Greece’s Traianos Dellas scoring a ‘silver goal’ to knock the Czech Republic out of Euro 2004. And it’s fantastic. Or you can try out Headers and Volleys, a digital recreation of a real-world classic that will have you sprinting down the wing and punting the ball into the area with uncontrolled glee.
But nowhere is the philosophy of FIFAball better reflected than in No Rules mode. Here, fouls, offsides and bookings are all turned off. Do away with those pesky rules and suddenly FIFA makes sense again. Sprint as much as you want! Smash the ball the length of the pitch to a striker standing in glorious isolation, twenty yards beyond the last defender and lash it into the net with aplomb. What a goal! What joy! What FIFAball!
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
