FIFA 18 (EA Sports, 2017, PlayStation 4)

I wrote this article for GameTripper in 2022, but it didn’t end up being published. I have made a few minor edits but have left largely as-was.

It started with the FIFA 18 mobile app. Well, it really started when a friend handed me a free special edition copy of FIFA 17 with a season pass for additional Ultimate Team rewards. Or it started when I spent early mornings playing sequences of online games of FIFA 09 against strangers, one rematch after another, the thrill of competition played out in a hundred bursting runs down the wing. It started, ultimately, when FIFA: Road to World Cup 98 did everything I wanted and more, and my brother and I played through every continent’s qualification campaign, and it became, if not my favourite football game, my favourite football game with that high of a level of resemblance to the real thing. The story I’m going to tell starts with the FIFA 18 mobile app, but it wouldn’t have happened without twenty years of enjoying FIFA games to back it up.

For anyone unfamiliar with FIFA’s Ultimate Team mode — FUT for short — I’ll explain. It’s based on the ingenious, diabolical idea of taking the collectible trading card concept of Pokémon cards, Magic: the Gathering and so on, and applying it to virtual football. It’s like the football stickers that I used to trade on the school playground, except that instead of being able to look at your Lars Bohinen sticker and stick him in your album, you get the virtual Lars Bohinen on your team alongside the other players you have cards for, with all of his skills and attributes. You can then take on other people’s similarly assembled teams.

The appeal of playing FIFA 18’s FUT was driven by those online matches. FIFA 18 was the latest refinement in a long line of highly refined games, and offered vast detail, a brilliant sense of real weight and space, and enough freedom and creativity that no two contests ever felt exactly the same. The game’s online season set-up, with each series of ten matches acting as your own season in which to rack up enough points to get promotion to a new division with more difficult opponents, compellingly backed that up. Every match carried narrative heft to add even more to the moment-to-moment excitement of trying to break through and score more than each unseen human opponent.

Playing FUT also allowed for developing your own style. First of all in the chance for your team to play in any kit you could find a card of, which for me mostly meant the incredible pink away kit of Colombia’s Tigres FC. More importantly, though, in the personnel of your club, a combination of random luck and careful planning. I ended up with a team with special shiny versions of Olivier Giroud and André-Pierre Gignac up front, two big French dudes who were not the quickest but both had a hell of a shot and unstoppable strength. I would pretty much bulldoze my way through opponents with a combination of quick passes between them and just shrugging off all but the most perfect tackles. Winning was fun, and even more so against clearly much more expensively assembled teams with Messi and Ronaldo and Aubameyang.

When I say expensively assembled, I mean in terms of FIFA coins and, probably, real money. When it came to new players, as with the football stickers, you had to open selections of random virtual cards and hope for the best. And FIFA 18 had a lot of players who were not the ones you wanted, so you would have to open a lot of packs. You could slowly get them by earning FIFA coins through playing matches. Or you could buy them with your actual currency. This has proved lucrative enough for EA that FUT makes up almost a third of its business, and for EA to decide to hide how much money it is making from FUT.

There are many, many stories out there about people overspending their money on loot boxes and gacha games. This is not one of those stories; I have never paid for any kind of loot box. I don’t see that as a point of pride so much as a result of a different kind of random chance in my own inclinations. I still think the way EA uses loot boxes is fundamentally wrong, and have the personal experience to back it up.

As well as gaining coins by paying for them or by playing matches, there was a third option: playing the FIFA economy. The secondary market for FIFA’s virtual trading cards was built into the game — part of the advantage for EA of making them virtual. It was possible to buy and sell players via a sort of low friction footballer-based Ebay, with bidding wars and Buy It Now prices. If you were quick enough, if I was quick enough, it was possible to identify a player being sold for a low price, buy them up, and sell them by auction for more coins. I did this. I did this a lot. And here’s where the app came in, because rather than being confined to sitting in front of my PS4, I could do it from my phone, anywhere with an internet connection.

The other thing available in the app as well as the game itself were ‘squad building challenges’. In the course of opening all those packs, it was inevitable to build up a vast collection of player cards, and here was one thing to do with them. Put eleven of them into a team which met certain requirements, and you could trade them in for packs and other rewards. These challenges were updated at least weekly and had a distorting effect on the game’s economy. 

At some point, each real-life football club in the game got their own squad building challenge, with the need to field eleven of their players in a specified formation. Sometimes these formations did not match the players available very well. For instance, the squad building challenge for LOSC Lille was a 5-2-3 and it drove prices for their centre backs and wingers through the roof. Anyone wanting to complete it would have to buy Nicolas Pépé at a price which was inflated out of whack with his actual abilities by an order of magnitude (insert Arsenal joke here).

The best way to get the best results from squad building challenges was often to dive in right away before the market had fully reacted. So I would make sure to have a supply of coins on hand, and be sitting refreshing the FIFA 18 app when Tuesday evening rolled around and new ones were usually added. Then I would act fast to try to get the best deals possible, ideally getting a couple of extra players to sell on throughout the week when the market did catch up. In between, I identified the best ways to earn coins from turning over sales on the app. 

Hellas Verona players were my favourite target, just popular enough to constantly be on the market without being in demand enough for their real values to be obvious. Looking at the squad list now, the names all bring back memories. Bruno Zuculini. Marco Silvestri. Lee Seung-woo. I have no idea of their virtues as footballers; I never even used them in-game. But I spent a long time buying and selling them for that little hit of money earned. Are they happy memories? Not in anything like the same way as scoring victories with my Gignac and Giroud double act, that’s for sure. Yet on train journeys, during breaks at work, so many times when I had a free moment and my phone, I would be there on the app. I loved playing FIFA 18 matches, but I almost certainly spent longer on compulsively buying and selling minor Serie A players to make a number go up.

I bought FIFA 18 on its release in September 2017, and right then I was going through a tumultuous time in my life. My partner and I were expecting a baby, I was newly supporting a friend through some awful stuff, and my dad had just been diagnosed with a return of cancer. All these things happened within the space of weeks, and that level of change, positive and negative, was a lot to try to deal with. Looking back now, I can see a very obvious connection between my mental state and the way I fell into a system set up to promote constant engagement beyond the point it was healthy.

Months later, our child’s due date was a month away, and I was still putting a ridiculous amount of time into earning enough coins to do every new squad building challenge going. We went to hospital for a routine scan and it turned out not to be routine at all. My partner had to stay in hospital and a few days later our baby was born, very small and early and needing a stay at the hospital (today they’re doing fine, and at school!). It was a terrifying and intense and weird time.

I have a specific memory of sitting at the hospital at some point during the long time we were there and looking at my phone, at the FIFA 18 app, and trying to complete a squad building challenge for a special version of Kaká. For the challenge you had to include an Orlando City player, and they were all being bought as soon as they hit the market, even at a max price of 10,000 coins. So it took a long time to get one. I only became more determined. I guess because so many things with different potential life-changing consequences were happening out of my control, I wanted to control this one familiar thing and have a victory, even if it was in aid of gaining a player who had no chance of making it into my team and I would never do anything with. It didn’t feel reassuring when I managed, though. It felt empty and sickening.

A month later the three of us were finally able to go home together. I had so many new and exciting and bewildering things to do. It wasn’t long until the first time I abandoned an online game of FIFA 18 partway through as a result. I didn’t ever pick it up again and I didn’t ever pick up the app again, either. I haven’t played any of the FIFA or EA Sports FC games since. I do miss the best bits of developing my skills and my team alike. But I don’t miss constantly being pushed to do more, more often, more more more. I’m happier with my life being filled with other, much better things, and with stopping doing what EA wanted of me. I loved FIFA games for a long time. It ended with the FIFA 18 mobile app.

Pros:

  • An incredibly detailed and involving simulation of football
  • Smart and polished online seasons structure
  • The chance to beat pay-to-win players while decked out in a pink tiger design

Cons:

  • Not all that different from FIFA 17, or probably FIFA 19 (I wouldn’t know)
  • Persistent rage quitter problems 
  • Predatory loot box system designed to ruthlessly exploit your attention, time and, ideally, money