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What has 25 years of FIFA given us?

(Matthias Hangst/Getty Images)
Roar Rookie
4th August, 2018
17

This year marks the 25-year anniversary of the first release of the video game FIFA, then known as FIFA International Soccer.

With each yearly release FIFA aspires to close the gap between simulation and the real thing, promising ever-increasing detail in player graphics and gameplay. Its attempt at realism has undoubtedly been the key to its cult following and domination of the esports market. Like the shiny, commercially accessible, branded-for-entertainment A-League, FIFA has always promised to be ‘new football’, not ‘old soccer’.

The past two and half decades have seen FIFA claim a significant amount of responsibility for exposing the USA to football and for increasing the sport’s popularity. A 2016 study by Andrew Markovits and Adam Green found that a correlation exists between the steady growth in FIFA sales and the rise in popularity of the professional men’s game.

The study even went so far as to suggest that the popularity of FIFA fertilised the ground for the development of Major League Soccer. Even celebrity powerhouse Drake, now an avid football fan, admitted in a 2014 ESPN interview that he simultaneously picked up the game and started learning about football.

In Australia FIFA has similarly broken itself into not only football and gaming culture but also popular culture more generally. You only have to watch the music video of emerging Perth rapper Hawi73’s new song FIFA to witness friends hanging out, controllers in hand, ‘cooling playing FIFA’ with ‘HSP for dinner’.

FIFA is a staple in Australian youth culture. Its potential here, as in the US, lies in its ability to engage those who have no personal or family history of playing football and give them a simulation of what the world may be like should they choose to be baptised into our code’s faith. This was the A-League’s goal too: to draw ‘old soccer’ away from the grassroots ethnic clubs of the NSL – clubs that had a passion for the game well and truly in their blood – and to promote the game’s entertainment value, marketability and accessibility for the uninterested and uninformed Australian.

But in its quarter of a century FIFA has done more than just change the landscape of football for the fans and promoters; it has wormed itself into the very way in which players and coaches themselves approach the game. FIFA.com reported that after saving a penalty from Ronaldinho in 2008 Parma goalkeeper Marco Amelia commented that the experience was “just like playing against him on Playstation. He had the same run-up. It was very strange”.

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EA Sports producer Gilliard Lopes Dos Santos also told FIFA.com, “For the action to be as realistic and impressive as possible, we record and study how the players move on the pitch, the precision of their passing, how they take a penalty, their headers, and even the physics of the ball”.

FIFA’s lifelike looks and its reliance on an incredibly well-researched database of player statistics has meant that teams have even begun to use the game for scouting or to practice against opponents, reported The Guardian in 2016. Real players are simultaneously virtual players: even Kylian Mbappe’s goal celebration – his arms folded with his hands tucked under and his thumbs stuck out – is borrowed from FIFA victories over his little brother.

Has FIFA’s influence been for the best? It has ensured the rise in popularity of football and has opened the game up to a legitimate claim on the sport’s international importance, particularly in Australia and the US, where this was lacking. But I am not particularly sure about what it has done for the quality of the game itself here.

Kylian Mbappe

(Matthias Hangst/Getty Images)

Though I have grown with the A-League, I can’t help but feel that Australian football’s golden era may have been the grassroots NSL era of pre-2005, especially since it produced the Socceroos of the 2006 World Cup. So I’m not convinced that that which is branded as shiny and bound for the future – both FIFA and the A-League – are really as full of substance as their surfaces indicate.

If the game’s simulation can help players learn how to play in real life, are we really seeing the benefits? Is the quality of football better now that it has become a profession in which people are able to play consoles in their leisure time, or was it better when people played entirely out of their love for the game, even though they often had to take on additional work?

In any case, for a game that has always aspired to emulate real life and which has done so fairly convincingly thus far, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps now it is real life that is aspiring to be an emulation of the virtual. I certainly experience a small brain lag every time I enter a room in which my friends or family have football on the screen – “Is this real? Or a simulation?”,

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It strikes me that as that lag gets slightly longer, the gap between real and virtual will become ever smaller.

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