“Ace on an unbroken line” – FIFA 11

Despite playing a huge amount of FIFA 10 and World Cup 2010, I didn’t play FIFA 11 at the time. It felt like time to give it a rest, and EA hadn’t had set up their full apparatus to make that a difficult thing to do. I would be back for FIFA 12.

One of those who may have been playing FIFA 11 was Spain midfielder Xavi (Barcelona, CM, rated 87). When asked in 2011 how to play on the back foot, Xavi said “People who haven’t played don’t always realise how hard that is. Space, space, space. It’s like being on the PlayStation.” As Supriya Nair put it at Run of Play, “even as those of you who play video game football do so in order to pretend to be Xavi, Xavi is playing football—in the Camp Nou, in front of 90,000 screaming fans and a century of footballing history—pretending to be video-game Xavi.”

What’s new in FIFA 11?

The back of the box gets pretty desperate this time. Second on the list is “Be the Goalkeeper”, a minor addition to a minor mode. There’s also a career mode promising the chance to be player, player-manager or manager for 15 seasons. As EA told Eurogamer: “We want you to feel as though there’s a whole world of football going on around you, like other European leagues running simultaneously to yours, so the whole world feels more alive.” Which is essentially catching up with Sensible World of Soccer 16 years late.

The biggest gameplay change comes under “real player personality”, with players given individual traits and specialties, like Poacher, Aerial Threat, and Acrobat. The idea of increasing differentiation between players is a sound one, but there’s not much there that isn’t a fancy version of existing stats, with the ability to do different levels of skills moves still more noticeable than anything new. Playing through a set of games with teams in different countries, it’s clear that representing different styles of play is as big of a struggle as ever, even as the audio nicely conveys different atmospheres.

Who is on the cover?

Wayne Rooney (ST, Manchester United, rated 88) once again takes pride of place, but is back to being matched up with a player from outside the Premier League, this time Kaká (Real Madrid, CAM, 86). The paint splatter effect is reduced and replaced with some subtle diagonal lines in their team’s colours. Which tie up with both in-game menus and the series’ white/black/red title colour scheme. It’s unusually well-thought-through, if not particularly visually appealing.

What’s on the soundtrack?

An even wider range of indie-adjacent cool sounds, the better to not hear the same thing too often and ideally not particularly notice it even then. 33 tracks in total, which is two more than the number of leagues in the game even.

Who is the best player in the game?

Finally dropping equal prominence for goalkeepers, the best player out on his own is Lionel Messi (Barcelona, RW, rated 90).

Who is the worst player in the game?

There was a bit of an overhaul here, with the player rating floor raised to 40, and 40 players sharing the honour.

Notables among them include Danny Ings (Bournemouth, ST, 40), who was then 18 years old and had already scored 7 league goals the previous season. He has since gone on to a more than decent Premier League career at Burnley, Liverpool, Southampton, Aston Villa and West Ham.

Even harsher than that rating is for Anders Christiansen (Lyngby, CAM, 40) to also be down there after a couple of seasons as a regular starter and key player for his club. The scattergun approach to ratings feels a long way from the level of detail Football Manager games were going to.

Finally, having moved on from Cittadella, Enrico Antoniol doesn’t appear in FIFA 11 at all, free after two years of being the worst player in FIFA.

What do the players look like?

No big changes but the new confidence to include close-ups at the start of matches is reasonably well-deserved.

How does it play?

After the quick action of FIFA 2010 World Cup South Africa, FIFA 11 slows things back down for something much tougher and bittier. The sense of weight is better than ever, with situations playing out more realistically in all kinds of little scenarios; every little deflected shot that a goalkeeper has to reflexively poorly save and every awkward cross that turns into an awkward weak header feels right. When two players go after the ball and collide the ball sometimes stays out of it altogether as they both go down together. It results in a lot of possibilities, but it does also make any free-flowing football harder fought than ever. The result is that I found myself harrying opponents as a priority above all else and scoring a lot of goals in a Lauren Hemp style.

How does it score on the sepp-blatter-rain-of-banknotes.gif greed index?

There really, really, aren’t a lot of changes and it was the second game that year. 0.8 sepp-blatter-rain-of-banknotes.gifs.

If FIFA 11 was a football team at the time, who would it be?

While tika taka passing football was still in the ascendancy, FIFA 11 and its emphasis on pressing seems to have been ahead of the zeitgeist. Let’s say Borussia Dortmund, about to win the league under Jürgen Klopp.