With the FIFA 19 release around the corner, how old is too old to play FIFA?

How has your relationship with FIFA changed as you’ve got older, would you say? For me, the sequence has gone something like this: the ultimate displacement activity at school, to a bit of an obsession in that hazy summer afterwards, to something I mainly did with a crippling hangover – cross-legged on the sofa, a complexion like white pudding, the late-morning light seared across my dried-up contact lenses as I suffered through consecutive defeats to West Ham and Aston Villa – to something I do occasionally on a quiet weekday evening at a mate’s house with a couple of tins.

Now an extremely jaded 26, in my version of adulthood there is very little room for video games. Where once I might have led Barnet to a double Champions League triumph on Career Mode, now I have other concerns like food shopping, changing lightbulbs, combating the spiders trying to annex my flat, the creeping anxiety of a no-deal Brexit and fretting over my pathetically inadequate exercise regime. The moment I realised I was too old for FIFA was when, at some point in my late teens, the thumb guard on my last working controller wore out from overuse. This led to an epiphany: there was no way I could replace that controller and realise any of my hopes and dreams.

The result is that now, when I do play FIFA, it feels somehow alien to me. The controls and game physics are both surprising and strangely familiar, comparable to attempting to hold a conversation in a language which you haven’t spoken in years. Hanging out with those friends who still make time for FIFA in their lives, there is a part of me which envies their ability shout at each other for hours on end to the backdrop of a dozen virtual Serie A fixtures. There is another part of me which feels, on balance, I made the right decision.

FIFA over Pro Evo?

The truth, however, is that FIFA remains an institution and has an emotional resonance for many people over and above that of other video games. The longevity of the series has been incredible: since the original ‘FIFA International Soccer’ was released on the Sega Genesis in 1993 with a surprisingly hirsute David Platt and Piotr Swierczewski on the front cover, there have been 25 console editions of the game compared to 18 for rival series Pro Evolution Soccer (not counting its origins as Goal Storm and International Superstar Soccer Pro). For so long laden with unlicensed team names like ‘London FC’, ‘Man Red’ and ‘Tyneside’, Pro Evo was never one for gamers obsessed with realism even if it has always had its converts and evangelists. There was nowhere near the hype around the latest Pro Evo as there is around the impending launch of FIFA 19.

FIFA has outsold Pro Evo massively in recent times and is the highest-grossing series by far, not that it has stopped the two games’ respective devotees arguing endlessly about which is better. Whatever the reasons behind their relative sales figures, it’s hard to dispute the idea that FIFA has the greater popular appeal and possesses a unique cultural cachet which spans generations.

Social function

Ask what makes FIFA so special, and most people will reply not with a meditation on its graphical and technical excellence but with an appreciation of its sociability as a game. Unlike most high-stress first person shooters and popular action-adventure franchises, FIFA works as a shared experience as much as it does a self-absorbed form of escapism. More than a video game, many seem to see it as a bonding exercise (EA Sports clearly realise this, with much of their pre-launch advertising focusing on FIFA as a communal undertaking). Mates, brothers and sisters, dads roaring like angry bears as their children dance nimbly about them with skill moves: many relationships and built on the foundations of the world’s favourite football simulator.

“I think there’s an interesting relationship with FIFA from those close to their siblings – outside of work, I still see it as the kinda standard thing to do with my brother when we’re just kicking about and chatting late at night. We’ll have a few beers, play a couple of games of FIFA,” Jack Collins, one of the guys behind the Fulhamish podcast, tells me via Twitter. Having brought up the idea of FIFA’s social function with friends, one messages me: “As a kid, it was a great escape from stress. My sister and I would regularly discuss issues we had during a game of FIFA. Those conversations probably wouldn’t have happened without the game, so it was actually an amazing way of dealing with personal problems and getting to know her.”

“[FIFA] used to be how we’d spend every free minute at uni,” says Laurie Havelock, journalist and one half of Podshambles. “Piling into somebody’s tiny first-year room, perched on the bed and beanbags, playing into the wee hours. Now, it’s something I’ll play with my flatmate when we’re bored or want to correct a result.” For the uninitiated, a quick explainer on ‘correcting’ a result from Laurie: “Mostly it’s righting supposed wrongs like, most recently, England’s World Cup campaign, or last year’s Champions League final. We lack the motivation to do every league game – or to mod Leyton Orient back into the Football League.”

For others, FIFA is something like an exercise in self-care. Maybe it’s the soothing, hypnotic monotony of Career Mode or the compulsive tinkering of Ultimate Team, but for many FIFA still represents the ultimate downtime. “It’s gone from my favourite leisure activity with mates to my only form of meditation,” says Nick Smith, Spurs fan and co-host of the TREAM podcast. “I generally get home from work 30 minutes before my other half, so I’ll stick on a podcast and play two matches of FIFA to reset and chill out. Luckily having the PS4 connected to our only TV means my play time is restricted.”

Some have been forced to take more active steps to reign in their FIFA addiction, however. “[It] got to a point when I was first earning money that I had to uninstall the game, because I was spending so much on Ultimate Team,” says Harry Sherlock, football journalist at Goal. “Genuinely, half my pay would disappear in a week.”

How old is too old?

Then there are those for whom fixation on FIFA either wanes or comes to a natural end once adulthood kicks in, just as it has for me. “[I’ve] gone from infatuation with an outdated FIFA 99 at my cousins’ and the jealousy from living in a console-less house, through moderate to severe addiction aged 15 to 18, to having not owned a copy in five years,” says Julius Flusfeder, QPR fan. “Now I find Ultimate Team culture equal parts bemusing and abhorrent.”

“It was quite a natural stop for me,” says Ed Tyler via Twitter. “It was when the PS4 came out and it seemed ludicrous to spend hundreds of quid on a console I only played one game on, and even that I was playing less and less post-uni.” The reality is that, as we slog on into our twenties, many of us have less and less time for sociability, self-care and restful procrastination, let alone realising our hopes and dreams. Work gets in the way, life gets in the way, and in that sense FIFA is a wistful memory of a time without commutes, without jobs, without mundanity, without council tax and utility bills.

That is why, while our relationship with the game changes as we get older, we are never too old to play FIFA. There are few video games which can claim to mean something to so many people: to have been the backdrop to so much nonsense, so many late-night conversations, so many hours which were both frittered away and conversely spent well.

There may no longer be time for hungover eight-hour sessions in front of the television, but those evenings with friends or snatched moments to ourselves are still meaningful. Few of us have the time to wear through any more thumb guards once we reach our twenties, but we can still shrug off the weight off adulthood while tearing through a few virtual football matches every now and then, at least.