For all of the attendant pomp and ceremony, the World Cup is just a bunch of football matches, right? That’s the approach EA Sports relied on, with FIFA World Cup Germany 2006 taking their latest mainline FIFA game — FIFA 06 — and making little real change. Gameplay is speeded up a bit, and your best players get meaningless star symbols above their head when in your control instead of triangles, but everything else is wrapping paper. The defence splitting through ball is still incredibly overpowered, meaning that the strength of opponents’ offside trap becomes the determining factor in difficulty.
As for the wrapping paper, the presentation of each match starts with the Earth floating in space and a zoom in to the relevant part of Germany, the most literal possible way to remind you this is the World Cup before putting you in the stadium with every shadow in place. Before kick-off, you get masses of ticker tape to try to create a sense of occasion, whether it’s Argentina v the Netherlands or Paraguay v Trinidad and Tobago. There is a passport that you add stamps to when you beat different teams, alongside a set of quasi-achievements that mean after almost any match the game fills in a new set of I-Spy Football Results checkboxes for you. On commentary, John Motson and Ally McCoist are replaced with the classic team of Clive Tyldesley and Andy Townsend, increasing the impression you could be watching ITV.
I watched most matches of the real 2006 World Cup, and plenty of memorable moments from it could be recreated in the video game version. The high quality semi-final between Germany and Italy, closely matched for nearly two hours of football before a sudden decisive momentum swing to a 2-0 Italy win. Argentina’s swift-passing 6-0 demolition of Serbia & Montenegro. Even Switzerland and Ukraine conspiring to play out the world’s most boring ever knockout football match with no prospect of a goal before moving to the sweet relief of penalties (Switzerland missed all of those too). FIFA World Cup 2006’s nature lets it capture all of those.
The World Cup is not just a bunch of football matches. New balls and FIFA referee edicts make changes, but there is something more fundamental that puts it into its own space entirely. The weight and the pressure of history and scale, that does unusual things to people. 2006 is a prime example, with many of its most memorable moments relating to the ill discipline that was a running theme.
‘The battle of Nuremberg’ between Portugal and the Netherlands, with its 16 yellow cards and two players red carded on each side, could conceivably take place within FIFA World Cup Germany 2006, at least with a longer match length set to allow time to do those fouls. Less so the tournament’s other even more extraordinary refereeing moment, when Graham Poll showed Josip Šimunić two yellow cards but forgot to send him off, before eventually completing business with a third. The robotic accuracy of the video game’s referees has no room for that, or even for smaller controversies. Its every perfect offside decision provides a pre-echo of the sanitised world of VAR.
And then there is the moment of the World Cup. The one which produced all the memes the booming internet could offer. The one which was briefly commemorated in a sixteen foot tall statue outside the Centre Pompidou. The moment when Zinedine Zidane, one of the world’s best players playing the final match of his career, had enough, headbutted Marco Materazzi, and walked off past the World Cup trophy. You could, in the video game, play a final between France and Italy, have Zidane launch into a savage off-the-ball challenge and, with a bit of luck, get sent off. It would not be remotely like the real thing, though. It would have nothing of the same sense of normal parameters being suspended, of an entirely new moment being created. EA were getting very good at making football video games, but as far away as ever from being able to do that.
FIFA World Cup Germany 2006 was UK #1 for a total of six weeks. Details of what else was top of the charts at that time after the page break.
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