The annual incremental tweaks to EA’s behemoth FC series make it easy to forget this was once a genre that took generational leaps every few years.
Soccer sims were defined and redefined throughout the 90s, noughties and 2010s, and certain features were so groundbreaking that they transformed how we play – sometimes instantly, some only in retrospect. With a bit of help from Richard Moss, author of Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games, I’ve picked nine of the most important features that changed football games forever.
CPU-assisted Passing – Soccer
Playing EA FC with fully manual controls, the ball travelling exactly in the direction you push the control stick, is humbling. You’ll realise your aim is not as good as you think and even completing simple short passes is a challenge.
It shows we take AI assists for granted – but they weren’t always there to help. The earliest football games took your input (usually in eight directions) as a direct instruction to pass the ball, so you could only really pass to teammates in specific spots relative to the ball.
In 1985, Konami’s Soccer on the MSX personal computer and the NES game Soccer both included CPU-assisted passing, Moss explains, “whereby your vague directional input to, say, up-left, is taken as a request to pass the ball directly to the nearest player in that direction, rather than an exact instruction to do a kick angled 45 degrees from the player”.
“It took a while to fully catch on, but by the mid-90s that became the standard passing mechanic,” he explains. I’m glad: I go through the occasional phase where I turn assisted controls down or off entirely but always, feeling defeated and pathetic, revert to default settings.
3D Graphics – Virtua Striker
Some 2D football games were fantastic, World Cup Italia ’90 and Sensible Soccer among them, but the 1994 arcade game Virtua Striker changed everything. It was the first football game with true 3D graphics: its polygonal players are slightly cursed in hindsight, their limbs long and misshapen, but their detailed animations felt like the future, pointing the way towards a true simulation of the sport.
Virtua Striker was perhaps underappreciated because it was only in arcades and the series wouldn’t be ported to consoles until several years later. But within a year of its release Konami and EA were in on the 3D act, and they didn’t look back.
Through Ball – Pro Evolution Soccer
In the early and mid-2000s FIFA was the more popular, flashier football sim but Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) was the purists’ pick. It felt realistically messy and, I’d argue, more satisfying than FIFA when you scored a slick team goal. Its superiority was summed up in one button: triangle. It triggered a through pass, kicking the ball into space in front of a sprinting teammate.
Konami tried it in the 90s – International Superstar Soccer 64’s through balls felt rigid and eerily magnetic – but perfected them in the PS2 era. They were incisive without feeling automatic. You still needed to get the timing and direction right, so you felt like a genius when it worked. Other developers were jealous.
“In the late 90s onwards, every other football game developer was looking at [Konami] and saying, these guys have killer through balls,” says Moss. “And EA, in this PS2 era, every season, they’re trying to figure out how to force a through ball mechanic into their game, when they had an engine that was not built for that.”
FIFA eventually caught up, and in both series, lofted through balls over the top to your striker became the de facto way to score in multiplayer against your mates. They’ve remained a key part of football sims, now with even more variations – but I don’t think they’ll ever feel as good as they did in those golden days.
Skill Stick – FIFA 2003
FIFA’s first iteration of the skill stick, the “Freestyle Control System” in FIFA 2003, was as clunky as its name. It felt slow and unimaginative, but over a decade of refinement it became an essential attacking tool.
Before then, skills in FIFA (and in Pro Evo) were mostly performed with button combos. Mapping them to the right stick enabled quicker tricks and more intuitive controls, and by FIFA 06 skill controls matched the natural shape of a trick. Flick forward and sweep to the side for a step-over, hold the stick left or right for a ball roll.
Today, high-level players rely on skill moves to fool defenders and create space for shots, with a move list long and complicated enough to rival a fighting game.
Finesse Shots – Pro Evolution Soccer 5
Pro Evolution Soccer 5’s “controlled shot” was the original finesse. Earlier games let you modify your shots beyond aim and power (you could chip the keeper in International Superstar Soccer, for example) but the precise controlled shot created a whole new way of scoring: Thierry Henry cuts inside from the left, aims for the far top corner, and curls it, starting outside the post but swerving into the top corner, past a diving keeper.
The mechanics of finesse shots have been constantly remoulded – today’s finesse shots have even more whip – but the fact you can score that exact goal in virtually every football game since PES5 highlights its importance.
Ultimate Team – FIFA 09
Ultimate Team is the behemoth that helped EA’s FIFA series pull away from Pro Evo. EA trialled a similar mode in its 2007 UEFA Champions League tie-in game, but the first proper version of Ultimate Team arrived in March 2009, as paid DLC for FIFA 09.
The core concept was instantly appealing: buying and opening card packs, improving your team chemistry, and building a bank of coins. It combined the stakes and action of online multiplayer matches with the luck-based compulsion of loot boxes – for better and worse.
FIFA 12 was the first to include Ultimate Team for free at launch. Demolishing the walls between the mode and the rest of the game confirmed that EA saw this as integral to the series, and the gamble worked – nowadays, EA FC is Ultimate Team to many people, and it makes the company boatfulls of money. Any would-be rival to EA is contending not just with its on-pitch action but with an entire ecosystem of YouTubers, influencers and real-life players (we’ve no doubt all seen players react to their in-game cards).
The controversy around the mode will never disappear – EA still can’t sell its in-game currency in Belgium because of gambling laws, for example – but Ultimate Team is here to stay.
360-degree Dribbling – FIFA 10
FIFA and Pro Evo still limited your inputs to eight directions as late as 2009 – a fact so unbelievable that I had to boot up PES 6 just to confirm it. Both series masked it with clever animations and by smoothing direction changes when you sprinted but we were, effectively, using D-pads for decades.
FIFA 10’s 360-degree dribbling (Pro Evo tried it the same year, with less success) unlocked a new level of freedom and flexibility. You could slip through tight spaces and skip past defenders smoother than ever before, and you felt more connected to the players you controlled. I remember spending hours sprinting around the Practice Arena with Wayne Rooney, spamming tricks and testing every possible direction change. Returning to a D-pad now is unimaginable.
Tactical Defending – FIFA 12
I still remember playing FIFA 12 for the first time. The fiddly defending controls bamboozled me and my friends and we vowed to return to FIFA 11. With a few exceptions, one-on-one defending in football games before then had involved holding a single button to, first, pressure and, second, tackle an opponent. FIFA 12’s tactical defending decoupled the two, with one button to “contain” the attacker, staying near them, and another to step in and attempt a tackle.
When I got over my initial frustration I realised that it was a more flexible system that let you choose a level of aggression that matched the situation, such as not diving in as the last defender. It rewarded patience and positioning, and made defending feel like a true skill.
EA FC 26’s “advanced defending” is, you might argue, the next evolution, further splintering the tackle button into multiple tackle types. We’re never going back to a one-button system.
Playstyles – EA FC 24
The one feature from recent years that feels truly foundational.
FIFA’s “traits” – badges that showed star players’ strengths and in some cases granted extra abilities – existed 15 years ago, but only for star players. When EA FC 24 changed them to “playstyles”, however, they became vital. They boosted specific skills and granted bespoke animations: “Press Proven” players kept the ball closer while jogging, “Bruisers” bounced opponents away in tackles like bumper cars. They were no longer limited to star players, which sprinkled personality throughout every squad.
Until FC 24 you judged a player by their overall rating, or sometimes by specific attributes relevant to their position. But playstyles were so powerful that they became equally as important. Now, I’ll pick a player with multiple playstyles even if their overall is underwhelming. In my EA FC 26 career I’ve just unearthed a young centre back with seven playstyles who’ll dominate the league for years.