'FIFA 98' Taught Me How To Be A Soccer Fan

​I remember the first time I watched a Premier League game. It wasn't on television. It was on my Nintendo 64.

It was the Fall of 1997. I was 9 years old. My parents let me rent EA Sports' "FIFA 98: Road to the World Cup" from the local video game rental store. I booted up the game, was blasted with Blur's "Song 2", and then, not fully understanding how the side select screen worked, started my first match.

I was blown away by the presentation. Here was British man, Des Lynam, welcoming me to this exciting match. Oh, and now he's handing it off to John Motson and Andy Gray, two commentators I had never heard of but trusted that they were Voices of Soccer merely because they had excellent accents. It was a night game and the players had shadows. Incredible! The players made grunts that echoed through the stadium. Passes and kicks produced satisfying thuds on the ball. The crowd generated a din that was distinctly un-American — gradually rising and falling instead of spiking.

Even though this was a video game, I wasn't playing. Earlier, I had neglected to select a side in the pre-game side select menu, so it was just the computer playing itself. That was OK. I was fine with just watching. This is what real soccer is supposed to look like.

Growing up as a soccer fan in the US in the '90s meant that watching the "real" players, namely the English Premier League, was a rare and chance occurrence. Well, at least for someone who was in elementary school, did not have access to the internet and thus had no idea how broadcast rights and schedules worked. Sometimes I could catch a game on ESPN — the only one I remember was Newcastle playing… someone — but growing up in a family who was as new to the sport as I was meant that none of us had the knowledge or incentive to start the now-familiar ritual of waking up early on Saturdays and Sundays to watch the Premier League.

Instead, I had "FIFA 98: Road to the World Cup." And after that first game, one thing was abundantly clear: There were so many names to learn! There is a sense, and this is not unique to soccer fandom, that at a base level, you're supposed to hear a name and recognize that they are a soccer player. Someone says "Overmars" and your response should be, "Ah yes, that is a soccer player that exists."

I figured this out because in "FIFA 98: Road to the World Cup" John Motson often uses the standard soccer commentary technique of just calmly saying a player's name. Robbie Fowler receives a pass and Motson just says "Fowler" — as if you're just supposed to know the exact context and significance of this one player coming into the possession of the ball. It did not help that nearly every time Manchester United midfielder Nicholas Butt got the ball, Motson would shout "Nicky Butt!" and my brother, who would always watch me play video games in the hopes that I would stop and he could start, would repeat the name and erupt into the kind of laughter that only a 5 year old could produce.

Luckily, playing "FIFA 98: Road to the World Cup" was a much better way to learn all the names than watching an entire English Premier League season. By default, a game in "FIFA 98: Road to the World Cup" lasts 8 minutes, which means the speed at which you are playing new teams and thus burning through new rosters is absolutely blistering. I could play out an entire World Cup, or an entire EPL season in a single afternoon. And I did.

That developer EA Canada went through the trouble of ensuring accurate rosters helped me learn names, but their ability to surface the nature and ability of players with what was a rudimentary stat system by today's standards did far more to familiarize myself with the world's best players than any single broadcast.

Over time, I learned to panic when Ole Gunnar Solskjaer had the ball in the final third, or curse the existence of David Seaman whenever he stymied a promising attack. I learned that you just couldn't give the ball to your best player and hope that he's able to go on 60-yard solo missions towards the goal. I learned that slide tackling the goalkeeper in frustration will net you a straight red card.

Because "FIFA 98: Road to the World Cup," and just about every sports game ever made, attempts to best emulate a television broadcast, I learned how soccer should look, sound and feel.

Having first heard it in the intro video, Blur's "Song 2" became, to me, a soccer song. In fact, if "FIFA 98: Road to the World Cup" was to be believed (and I did believe it) "soccer music" was exclusively big beat electronic music. Advertisements must run the length of the touchline. Based on Motson's enthusiastic commentary, near misses should be celebrated, not punished. Similarly, whether this was a conscious design decision based on the small amount of pre-recorded lines on hand or not, commentary didn't need to fill every second of a game.

I found myself obsessing over all small details of "FIFA 98: Road to the World Cup." The ones that you just don't get growing up playing youth soccer here in America, where a majority of the coaches are just dads who are also trying to figure out this soccer thing for their son.

Goalkeepers, when setting up for a goal kick, must make a divot underneath the ball with their foot. When it snows, you play with an orange ball. The real players don't line up and shake hands after a game, they just wander around and informally talk to other players. When you score a goal, you run to the corner flag and slide on your knees.

I'd go out into the shared yard of our condominium complex and attempt to emulate the digital players I'd just been playing with minutes before — an emulation of an emulation of the real thing. But when you're 9 years old and have watched three actual broadcasts of the real thing, it's easy to feel like the video game is just as real. And it was, and still is.

Eventually, I got older and "FIFA" series became a rough approximation of something I loved. I figured out how to watch it regularly on TV. I started playing the sport at a relatively high level. I didn't need the video game anymore, I was living it.

I'm not the only American soccer fan who found a love of the sport through a video game. I know dozens of friends who knew nothing about soccer — even expressed disgust over it — only to pick up FIFA in a college dorm room somewhere and suddenly find themselves transformed as a soccer fan. And, in fact, this combination of playing FIFA and then watching the World Cup is the most common thread amongst US soccer fans.

Perhaps it's different for today's American soccer youth. Now that NBC and its transplanted cast of commentators — something that the FIFA series and its normalization of British commentary for American audiences — has managed to turn the EPL weekend into a cultural phenomenon, there's less of a reliance on a video game to give you the Authentic European Soccer Experience. The American Soccer fandom is now defined by going to a bar at 6 AM to watch your favorite team play, rather than playing them in "FIFA."

But looking back, nothing makes me wish I could go back to those early years playing soccer like "FIFA 98: Road to the World Cup." I've watched old broadcasts from the same time period, and they feel alien, an alternate universe I never got to experience. Which is fine, I think. I prefer my own, where the US wins the 1998 World Cup