“But do you love yourself?” – UEFA Euro 2004

[For this guest post, I am delighted to welcome Oma Keeling for the first time! Oma is a freelance writer, artist and art historian. They run GlitchOut, a blog dedicated to altered and alternative game experiences. Find them on Twitter @GlitchOutMain and @OKthanksgames.]

**UEFA Euro 2004** (EA Sports, PlayStation 2, 2004)

UEFA Euro 2004: A letter to my younger self on playing EA football games.

Go outside.

Mum says go outside but there’s nothing to do outside right?

You could literally emulate the drama and tension of international sports competitions right here, in your own room. Why do you need to go out into the hot heat, and be embarrassed by the fact you have no-one but your siblings and grandparents to hang out with these days? When it’s too bright and you have hay-fever and what are you gonna do, find yourself?

Don’t worry kid, that part will come soon enough, revelling in long walks down by the water away from everyone else and realising a thing or two about not being a boy. But, until then, the summer is for sports, right, the digital kind, the type you watch on the small screen and then sure maybe you go kick a ball around once in a while. Every time you do so, giving the illusion of feeling up to filling in those outlined sketches of expectations as to what you enjoy.

You don’t want to be in the football club at all, and because of that, for a long time, you’ll try and say that you don’t like sport, during a protracted phase of pretentiousness that really you should know about before it happens. It’s good to know that in fact yes, sometimes it is you who’s being a problem. But again, what was I here to talk about, oh yeah…

“EA Sports – It’s in the game.”

The game is UEFA Euro 2004, and it’s one of the ones you don’t have isn’t it, since it’s honestly an odd choice to buy a game devoted to a single competition, when you could have FIFA and play with all the league squads too. Unlike the way FIFA is going to go in the future, basically turning the game’s customization into a money making machine, Euro 2004’s game is a full package. It contains all of the teams who could have been involved, and all of the modes of play inside unlocked as standard, from actually emulating the entire run of tournament games, friendlies in 2002 up to the final, to cut down versions for the casual player.

Remember that competition?

July 2004, Portugal vs England in the last-8, you’re sitting on the armrests between the two white couches, slightly dangling in the gap, as you eat chocolates in your pyjamas and your mum and stepdad have a lager and burger and that. Remember, and the utter disappointment that came when your team went out on penalties.

In 2021 that’ll be very different. England will win 4-0 in the quarter finals and you won’t feel the slightest bit of joy, despite the team being in general a kind of hotter and more likable lot, you just can’t bring anything resembling celebration to it. Not for the team of a country that just killed 128,000 people, mostly disabled like you will be, (get ready for that one), and is bringing in laws that make it illegal to be a gypsy or traveller like one of your girlfriends will be, or to save someone from drowning if they’re a refugee, or to protest even, like you will have to do, to keep what other rights the English might be about to lose.

You will make the decision to move as far away from your family as possible when you can. That will be good since it will get you out of England and into Scotland, which isn’t much better, but at least isn’t comically evil.

But football, right?

Quarter Finals:

Portugal 2 – 1 Turkey

England 2 – 1 Ukraine

Scotland 1 – 0 Liechtenstein

Spain – 2 – 1 Sweden

When you play the quarter finals in EA’s Euro 2004 game, it will be remarkably similar to the way it plays out in the future. Out of the game’s odd colour splash styling, and europop that sounds like Fatboy Slim, The Streets and Franz Ferdinand ripoffs to your English ears, comes a draw that is, for England at least, identical to their 2021 Quarter Final, up against Ukraine.

Of course, you’re not controlling either, and are in the quarters with Portugal and Scotland, since the host team that knocked England out of the 2004 tournament, and your new home team better fit where your head’s at. In fact, you chose to run all of the other UK nations in the game, Wales and Northern Ireland too, but they were knocked out in the group stage.

Semi Finals:

Portugal 1 – 2 England

Scotland 2 – 0 Spain

The two teams match up 17 years later, in the semis now, with an England side you can recognise like the back of your hand. Beckham, Owen, Lampard, Gerrard, Owen, Scholes, Cole, Neville, Terry… It’s odd how legendary this side was for the fact that they never really went anywhere with their recognisability. These are rockstar footballers and when they beat you 2-1, that’s infuriating, it’s meant to be the other way around in the game right. In the game you’re meant to finally be able to show England where to shove their nationalism. Thus, I have to look to the breezy win over Spain that Scotland has, which sets up a meeting in the final with a traditional enemy of Scottish pride – English football.

Final:

England 2 – 0 Scotland

For the final of the 2004 competition, there’s not much to say. In my head it’s anticlimactic because I lose. I lose to England, again, like I have been doing my whole life, losing my inherent human dignity belonging to a nation that values whiteness and jammy, creamy scones over any improvement in the lives of the vast majority, and especially not for the 20% of people who live in poverty there alone.

In the commentary box John Motson and Ally McCoist (from the telly) outline the artificiality of this fixture with their calm, non-partisan and regularly dismissive approach to a game where their national teams are meeting in a major tournament final. Like the game, it’s all just script stuff to them. It’s a disappointing match on the whole, not getting to thrash England, but if I had been able to, would this have been a good time?

Ultimately, I leave the game wishing for better days, and remembering you, playing for hours on end, before you really understood what it was to be English, nostalgic or consumed by irony. England are in the final now, and very soon I’ll know if they go on to win the tournament, and I expect to feel the same as I did when I emulated that situation.

Anyway, I know you’re likely deep in emulating a Fulham or Inverness Caledonian Thistle league run at the minute, but listen to me, the increase in quality of these games and their ability to actually emulate how you watch or play football (badly, aggressive defense), kind of becomes nil at some point in the mid 2010s.

Sure, the play simulation from 2004 makes you feel like you’re running through mud, so I’d recommend something in the 2008-2016 range, but you’ll never really master a more complex approach to playing sports games than ‘the thrill of it’. Euro 2004, and that era, will always feel like home.

Also, I got distracted from my actual point there, and it was this – listen, you’re not going to be a very happy person for the next few years, some really bad stuff is going to happen, and so it’s important you have things you love, and eventually people, but for now, keep up the FIFA. You’ll always be able to think about it instead of other stuff, it’ll introduce you to music you still love 15 years later, and after all, there’s nothing like scoring a goal.