Autumn Is Here, and with it Comes FIFA

I have decided to get good at FIFA this year. This is the year.

There are three kinds of FIFA player: first, the incompetents – those who need the controls explaining to them every time, who do not know that sprint is R2, who ask you "what's pass?" while calmly idling with the ball in front of their own goalkeeper, then boom, hit square as hard as possible, turn around and just smash the ball into touch, anarchy. (These players are the worst to play against, because they are so bad that beating them isn’t even fun: it’s like beating a man in an iron lung at a 100m sprint).

Then you have the weirdly good kids, the YouTubers and proto-YouTubers, lads in neatly laundered tracksuit bottoms who can do spider-legged tricks and first time flicks and actually know how to take penalties, and if you get them on a good day you can hold off 2–2 until the final minutes, where their preternatural FIFA concentration – and the fact that they’re playing with whatever team has Ronaldo – overwhelms you, last minute goal, 3–2, but if you get them on a bad day they just hammer you, relentlessly, 8–0, 9–0, no mercy.

Then, in the grey squishy middle, you have me, and probably you, and most of your mates, and most of everyone who plays FIFA: rigidly, stoically playing it in the exact same way you always have, that intricate passing method you rely on, or that wing-play trick, or that two-touch finish you first learned in 07 that is now hard-coded into you, your fingers and your thumbs, your muscle memory, too baked-in now to change (imagine taking a corner on FIFA without crushing down the L2 button in the short loading sequence to call a second man: you can't, can you? The idea of it is agony).

But this is the year I’m going to burst through from the middle to the top. I'm going to watch videos and read control setups. I’m going to learn how to actually do one (one.) trick. I’m going to finesse my shooting skills better than just holding R1 while I hammer it. This is the year, this is the year, this is the year.

Previous years I have said this: 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18.

The year is 1997 and I am playing my first FIFA. It is a grey GameBoy cartridge with David Ginola on the back, the logos carefully airbrushed off of him, though, so he is wearing a blank zebra-striped top as he sprints out of a blue-on-white explosion. The Volvo I am in is juddering from side to side. The sky is the colour of iron and most of the things we own are strapped to the roof. We are off on a week-long British seaside holiday. In the back, laced up with anti-motion sickness armbands, I am playing FIFA 97 in grey and green shades. It is absolutely shit. It is a shit game. Look at this shit:

Memory is a weird thing; it can implant false stories and sensations where there were none. And I want to be like: when I was a boy, playing FIFA 97 on a GameBoy… it felt like I *was* David Ginola! Like: I knew what it was to embody Eric Cantona. Because for one small moment – 160 pixels wide by 144 pixels high – I… I was Eric Cantona. But no, no. FIFA 97 wasn’t like that. It was shit then and it is shit now. It rendered like two players, maximum, at any one time on the screen. The ball skipped eerily across the grey pitch in 2.5D. None of the players were discernible from one another. Scoring goals was near to impossible. It was, truly, close to unplayable, and when each game’s final beep rolled around, it was a breath-releasing relief to not be playing any more.

Did I still hammer it relentlessly until the AA batteries ran out somewhere on the outskirts of Whitby? Yes, yes, I did. Because FIFA is FIFA. This would not be the first time I would place it at the behest of myself in my lifetime.

Autumn is a time for which we have made up modern rituals to replace the void where we once cared about, like, harvest. Every other season has its thing: Winter has Christmas and New Year. Spring has Easter. Summer has That Weird Six-Week Period Where You Genuinely Get Into Pimm's. What does autumn have? Ten years ago: nothing. Now: everything. The arrival of the Pumpkin Spice Latte is a genuine event. For some reason we are all bang into Hallowe’en now. Conkers, shit like that. In a decade, we will celebrate late November with a light Thanksgiving roast. We are nuts for autumn. We are crazed for it. September used to be a time of trudging back to school, and the sky turning dark, and the first rainfall in months that necessitated you wearing sturdy boots to combat it. Now it is: soup, and the imminent X Factor knockout rounds, blankets and hygge. The quiet few moments you spend taking your Big Coat out of the cupboard and checking the pockets hopefully for change.

Autumn is about all that, yes, but autumn very crucially is also about this: about this week, when payday drops, and the bright-illuminated lights of the supermarket call you, and you get the new FIFA game, and play it for 40 hours in one week.

The lay observer would suggest the new FIFA game is basically the old FIFA game with new player names and numbers. Anyone who says this is an idiot. Consider, for instance, the menu, which is always slightly different. The warm-up drills, also. Ronaldo plays for Juventus now. So, you see, there are loads of improvements; the game has been overhauled.

FIFA 19 literature suggests there are hundreds of changes, but as best I can tell there's this: a new trick where you can press shoot again after you shoot to try and make a "sweet spot" shot, which your younger brother is going to master and you are not, and you are going to get very angry at him and the game about that, and it’s possible you’ll even go so far as to throw a controller, either at the TV or at the window, and this tantrum will end up costing you between £48 and £300; new, neat-looking tactical set-ups that you can tinker with before kick-off, so now when you pulse to "Attacking" and then "Ultra Attacking" those team shapes are predefined by you; they have the Champions League rights, with Lee Dixon doing the co-commentary, which I know I have been crying out for; the game’s mini-map icons are triangles and circles, now, instead of just circles.

But it’s not really about those tangible, saleable mechanics: the buzz of FIFA is how it feels different, every year, just polished and shiny enough to seem new. The buzz of FIFA is that you have worn out your previous copy of FIFA (there is a special mental condition psychiatrists have yet to name, but it’s on the same spectrum as Stockholm Syndrome and traumatic memory: the sensation of hearing a FIFA song, played infinitely at you during the menu screens, out in the wild, in a pub or club or shopping centre, somewhere where a gigantic looming Marco Reus is not there to make things feel correct, and you disassociate, slightly, and your heartbeat increases) and now you have a new copy of FIFA, and you can plunge into a whole new world of making Middlesbrough win the Champions League.

I think everyone who has played FIFA with any degree of ferocity has had a year where they simply got Too Into FIFA. FIFA is a game that cannot, truly, be mastered – the beauty of it is that it is 22 renderings of chaos crashing in to one another repeatedly, and that every match can swing from victory to defeat, because of the infinity of statistics and game mechanics behind every swing of a boot or leap for a ball, meaning, much like the real game, true and accurate predictions on winning outcomes can never really be predicted – apart from, like, me, with FIFA 13, which I completed despite it not technically being completeable.

You will have had this. It doesn’t quite matter what the circumstances are – a life-shocking break-up, the second year of your degree, a night shift job where you can quietly sneak your PlayStation in, living in a houseshare with six other men who sullenly play FIFA together instead of having emotions, or just that the greens and swirls of crowd noise and the long-limbed run of Ronaldo is especially hypnotic to you when you are 22 and quite stoned – but either way there are, out there, copies of FIFA that are A Problem, and this year FIFA 19 is waiting to be someone’s anew.

In university, before FIFA had fully ascended to the crown and it and PES were squabbling it out year after year to see which could be the best football simulator, I had to ritualistically dispose of a copy of Pro Evo I was too addicted too by frisbeeing it off a bridge. Five years ago I had to make a life decision to stop playing the Ultimate Team mode of the game because I was finding myself talking about it, out loud, in bars, to women. The crackling thrill of FIFA on launch week – you are already considering when you can next get the boys to bring their controllers round for four-play games and Domino’s, aren’t you? – can so quickly slide to you, alone on a bridge in the grey fog of the night, watching a Blu-Ray disc glimmer into the sea.

A lot of the first-released shots of the new FIFA show Neymar Jr., perfectly pressed PSG shirt, dripping in rendered sweat. The sweat is what bothers me: FIFA, in recent years, as it has rolled up from "an annual triple-A licensed football simulator" to "a juggernaut all of its own, an even more glittering and moneyed arm of the most glittering and moneyed game on earth", has pressed further into the realms of realism, and in doing that it has not massively overhauled the system of mechanics underpinning the game (it’s always going to be pass, move, shoot), and instead focused on making the game look like you’re watching the sport on TV, with all the idents and swooshing camera angles, and focus-on-possession stats projected on screen, and roving advertising hoardings, and sweat.

For the past four or so years, every time you shank a shot wide or have a penalty tipped around the post, the FIFA auteuristic camera zooms in on Neymar, or whoever, gemmed with sweat, shaking his head in eerily human mo-cap. The point of FIFA (the game) is to be a terrifyingly realistic football experience; the point of FIFA (the experience) is taking those realisms and bending them, contorting them wildly, and making them high fantasy.

Example: we all agree we had to throw a copy of FIFA into the sea to stop us from playing it. That we all agree on. Consider also this: did you ever sign a player on FIFA, for your team, in Career Mode, who was so unstoppably fantastic (out of kilter with the player’s real-world development, often) that you still talk about them to this day? Everyone has one. Seydou Doumbia, for example, who propped up my FIFA 15 Ultimate Team then transferred to Newcastle (me, the day Seydou Doumbia signed with Newcastle: "He’s really good!" You embarrassed me, Seydou Doumbia). Viktor Fischer, the Ajax prospect I bought to Milan and turned into an all-star (me, the day Viktor Fischer signed with Middlesbrough: "He’s really good!" You embarrassed me, Viktor Fischer). Chelsea youngster Alex Kiwomya, who was so untouchably pacy that every time I played him up front in a friendly game against my housemate Fred I beat him four, five-nil, until I was banned from using Alex Kiwomya (Alex Kiwomya now plays for: Doncaster)

Everyone has one player, or one perfect iteration of a squad, or one run to Premier League glory, or one international trophy hoisted aloft by an inexplicable Charlie Adam. A lot of FIFA is about the gloss and glamour of playing Manchester City–Barcelona with your mates: yes. But a lot more of it is you, alone and bathed in the blue glow of your TV, getting weird, trying to sign Gonzalo Higuain to Everton, pushing the very limits of reality to their breaking point.

But the leaves roll in and you are trying to master the triple elastico while your phone buzzes next to you, ignored. This is the obsession that will warm you through the autumn. FIFA is here: shh, shh, FIFA is here. The all-day four-star teams-only tournament round at yours. Shouting "best of five!" after you got beaten in two games to best of three. Going 4–0 down so doing a slide tackle and getting one straight red, two straight reds, sometimes three straight reds. Wiping the oily residue of pizza crust on your trousers so you don’t sully the controller with your grease. The supermarket is open at midnight. The only game you still pore over with excitement like you’re still a kid. You, through on goal, Ronaldo, hat-trick. You, through on goal, Messi, hat-trick. Tinkering with the Dortmund line-up for so long the TV goes onto standby mode. That weird silent lad – the mate of a mate – who bizarrely has to set his controls to "Custom A". You still cannot switch kits from the in-game menu in the instance of a kit clash. The game is still not coded with random handballs. You do not care. It is a penalty shoot out. It does not feel like a win. You, saying this, to a digital totem of a referee that only ever makes flawless foul calls, only ever calls offside to millimetre-perfect precision: "REFEREE!" You, seconds after conceding your second goal in five minutes, turning your controller over and looking at the back of it: "There’s something wrong with this." You, repeating the curious way the FIFA commentator says "Vincent Kompany": "Vin– sahn Kahm–pan– ee". You are convinced that, like astrology, you can tell the personality types of your friends and acquaintances by the way they play FIFA: guarded, flamboyant, exuberant, so good at it as to suggest deep ravines of loneliness within them. You are sending an abusive message to a 12-year-old and getting banned from Xbox Live. The new game is so perfect now that it has coded-in imperfections: the ball bobbles off shins more, passes can slow on the grass and go to nowhere, 50:50 challenges can lead to errant bobbles, the triangles of green between players has opened up like another pitch inside the pitch. You have somehow spent £60 this month on FUT pack. You are up late now, watching YouTube, watching KSI on low volume because he keeps shouting, desperately trying to learn how you, too, can be more sweaty. You and your friend make a sacred vow to choose teams of roughly the same skill level, but when you choose Watford, he – quickly, like a magic trick – goes left, left, left, right right right right right, X, and selects Real Madrid. If you beat him you will never shut up about it. If he wins then that’s not fair. This is how you talk to people, now, from here until at least December: mouth softly open, eyes slightly glazed, clicking through the tactics menu perfectly lining up Liverpool. Twenty-one years ago FIFA was grey pixels of shit, and now you can see the beads of sweat on Giorgio Chiellini’s cheeks.

FIFA is the same every year, yes, more or less, but it’s also progressing, getting bigger and glitzier and more bombastic as each year goes by. But you don’t notice that, do you? It’s dark outside and you can see your face reflected back on you through your window like a mirror. You have a hoodie on over your head and you are hunched. The warm blue glow of your controller illuminates your face. This is a man who knows the depths of the Real Madrid bench better than he knows himself. This is a man who has scored more than 50 goals with Edin Dzeko alone. This is a man who is convinced he is going to get good at it, this year, this year. Autumn is here, and with it your dark descent into madness. Autumn is here, and FIFA is here with it.

@joelgolby