How FIFA, Sensible Soccer and Manchester United Changed Football

For many young football fans, video games are their primary way of engaging with the sport. But while gaming has never been bigger with fans, the number of games that dominate their time is small, dominated by the likes of EAFC, eFootball and Football Manager.

But that wasn't always the case. In his new book, 'A Tale of Two Halves', Richard Moss profiles over 400 games from the 1980's to 2010's, shining a light on their development and how they moved the industry forward. Peppered among the pages are references to what was going on in football during this time and features covering major tournaments and examples of on-pitch success.

On the latest Footballco Business Podcast, Richard joined us to discuss how some of these games changed how fans engaged with football and helped to shape the sport.

In this newsletter, we're covering the early days of the FIFA video game, Sensible Soccer and the Manchester United series. To hear about other games, including PES, NWSL Soccer, listen to the full show by searching for 'Footballco Podcast' or clicking below.

FIFA

Today, EAFC, formally known as FIFA, is by far the most popular football video game, a culture defining title that has impacted how fans engage with football like no game before it. But in the mid-90s, EA Sports's (EA) ambitions were much smaller, and their experience in football was limited. So much so that, as Richard explains, they weren't even aware how licencing worked - a fact that's even harder to imagine now following EA's split from FIFA last year.

The name thing was largely naivety [EA being under the impression that the FIFA lisecnce gave them rights to player names and likenesses], I think. The people who did the licensing for EA, they just assumed, because that's how it works with the American leagues. Get the governing body, the NBA, the NHL, the NFL. You just get them. You've got everything because that's how it works in America. But of course, football, being this global sport, is very different.

FIFA sets the rules, but then there's player organizations and there are individual leagues all around the world and you've got to make negotiations with them and more recently also with individual players. And so they just, didn't realise that until it came time finish the game and put the names in and, 'oops', we don't have the rights to the names. We only have the rights to FIFA as a brand.

It took a couple of years for them then to, catch up. It was FIFA 96 where they finally had real player names in there.

One of the reasons behind FIFA and now EAFC's success has been that while some games have strived to replicate what happens on the pitch to on the games console, EA have walked the line between arcade and simulation, prefering to mimic the football highlights fans see on TV over what they might watch for ninty minutes in the stands.

This was where FIFA was a paradigm shift. Before that, football games were just fun. They're sort of like having a kickabout in your backyard. They're very fast-paced. They play really loose with the rules and FIFA didn't play very well with the rules, but it was trying to mimic football as you saw it on TV. It's not a game first. It's, I hesitate to say simulation, because it's not quite simulation, but it's about imitating TV in a sort of Hollywood way. It's a popcorn-style football. Let's take all the boring bits out or what's perceived as the boring bits by these Canadian developers and make it really fast and exciting. And every moment is a highlight-worthy moment.

You can score from kickoff the first time you play the game. It's likely that within 10 seconds, you're going to end up doing some sort of flick on header. You're to do maybe a bicycle kick. You'll have a long-range drive, and you're just pressing buttons. You don't know what does what yet. And it's really exciting. It's spectacular. And that's how it was right from the start. And that's kind of how it drew its audience in.

Sensible Soccer

Shortly before FIFA was released, a little further back in the '90s, a smaller English development studio released a genre-defying game that pushed against trying to create lifelike visuals and instead produced a blocky but hugely enjoyable game that had an impact on fans' awareness of global football, made strides in representing race and created an iconic visual style. A style that came about almost by accident.

Around about 91, they [Sensible Software] had this strategy game coming out called Megalomania. It's a real-time-strategy-ish thing that is hybrid with a God Game. They just finished the game, and to let off steam, they thought it would be fun to put the character sprites from this game in football kits. And so they decked them out in Norwich City kits. And then they thought, hey, this is kind of fun. How about we give them a football and then so in this Megalomania game engine, they started kicking a ball around and they thought there's something to this.

It's a bit more zoomed out than Kick Off, which was the popular one at the time. Kick Off is so fast. You can run from one end of the field to the other in seven seconds. So they zoomed it out more and that made it more strategic. There's more of a tactical element to it.

At the time, other games had players with different skin tones, but they weren't based on real players. There may have been black players in the digital England team in other games, but where those players played wasn't based on real players. Sensible Soccer changed this; now, if you played John Barnes down the wing and David Platt in midfield, your John Barnes would have black skin, and Platt would be white. Likewise, players would now perform like their real-life counterparts, kickstarting fans learning about players' strengths through their digital counterparts, much like they do know through EA's Ultimate Team.

You had real players in it. And if they were black, they were black. if they were Asian or something, then they had an in-between skin tone. So there are actually, I think, four different skin tones in the game. And they hired a football journalist to make sure that they got the right skin colors for every player that's in the game and also to do stats for the players.

This is one of the first times, maybe the first time where you had a professional coming in and giving players their ratings in the game. There'd been a few games along the way that had player ratings, player abilities, particularly in the management space. But then here you had players with abilities that, according to an actual professional journalist, reflected their real life capabilities. I think that's the big stuff.

Manchester United

Few teams encapsulate the changes that were happening in modern football during the 90s better than Manchester United. While the decade was spent collecting trophies on the pitch, off it, they were changing how business was done and how clubs were seen as brands, resulting in the club generating £249m in income between 1992 and 1997.

This new way of thinking saw Manchester United become an early example of a team being licensed to create a video game.

They were a rare case of a licensed football game. Before FIFA came along, if you had a licensed football game, it's probably just someone has been called by their agent who said, 'You want to put your name on this game?' and they said, 'Sure, how much are you going to pay me?' That's the extent of the licensing. It's their naming rights and maybe a picture on the title screen.

But here with the Manchester United Computer Game, I think was the name of the first one. The second one, a year or two later, was Manchester United Europe. And then there were two more after that.

This is a game that was built from the ground up as a Manchester United-focused game. It's pervading right through it. You're controlling Man United. You've got licensed players from Man United who have mostly accurate stats. You're looking at these little pixelated representations of the individual players. All the way through, it is a Manchester United game.

It's not a particularly good game. It's kind of fun. It looks really good for the time. Some of the best graphics you had in football games at the time. But the fact that it had this Man United name attached to it...made it a success. It was like a million seller at a time when you had a huge hit if you had 10,000 sales, it was huge!

And so then they've done this twice, everyone else thinking, 'hang on. What are these guys doing? Maybe we should do something'. And so then you've got a Liverpool official game, which is kind of crap. And you've got a Leeds United official game, which is also kind of crap. But people are trying, they're getting this idea and bit by bit, as the decade goes on, licensing becomes the standard thing to do.

People start to realise that these licenses increase sales and the leagues and the players also get more savvy about it. And they start to realise that there's a value here.

Iit all just kept growing from there. You had players starting to do individual brands, too. Like Ronaldo had a really popular game in '99, I think. There was a David Beckham game. There's a whole lot of games that were individual players licensing out their name.

With video games now both a significant source of revenue and an important channel for fan engagement, it’s hard to imagine that soccer once viewed them as a gimmick.

Admittedly, the sports gaming industry in the 1980s felt a bit like the Wild West. Some titles were hastily assembled to make a quick buck – many people are probably still trying to forget ‘Peter Shilton’s Handball Maradona’ – and technical constraints hampered quality. As soccer morphed into a commercial juggernaut towards the end of the 20th century, gaming went from subculture to mainstream.

Today, clubs use video games to attract a younger demographic and have dedicated esports divisions with millions of followers. However, ballooning costs mean it is getting harder for new developers to challenge the dominance of Electronic Arts (EA), which has exclusive licensing deals and technological resources that effectively give it a monopoly on the soccer simulation market.

The cliché goes that competition drives innovation, but some fans feel there has been a lack of both in recent years. Indeed, EA’s FIFA franchise – now EA Sports FC – hasn’t had a serious rival since Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) lost ground in the late 2000s.

Meanwhile, the latest release of Football Manager was delayed from this November to March 2025 – a blow for developer Sports Interactive that was perhaps softened by there being no direct competitor to fill the void.

Even so, it is the work of these developers, and many more over the years, that has made video games a major part of modern soccer culture.