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Manchester City’s Rúben Dias was not happy. Asked to comment on his FIFA ratings for 21/22 ahead of the new number for the 22-23 season, he picked out ‘Pace - 61’ with the comment: “Well, I hope they have a bit more respect for me. And I hope we got close to 70.”
Asked to predict his rating, he said, “68”. When his pace was revealed as 63, the Portuguese shook his head and said, “Oh, my goodness.”
“Well you’ve improved by two,” replied the presenter.
“I’m not even going to think about it too much,” said Dias.
“You are slower than John Stones in the game. How do you feel about that?” The presenter wasn’t going to let it drop.
“I’m probably slower than everyone in the game,” replied the crestfallen Dias. “I’m just going to say that it’s impossible that Bernardo, I don’t know how much he has, but it’s ridiculous. Put me running with him on the pitch. It’s outrageous.” Nobody had even mentioned his compatriot Bernardo.
Dias is one of the best defenders in the world, but don’t be surprised by his reaction. FIFA ratings are taken seriously by a lot of players – especially when they’re accused of having a lack of speed.
“Players all talk about their ratings,” Premier League winner Danny Simpson tells British GQ. “Most of us played FIFA and I was always ok with my ratings but I’ve seen plenty of players who are not happy. I remember at Leicester when a player had a slower speed rating than Wes Morgan. Nobody really says ‘my technique rating is better than yours’ or ‘my power is better than yours’. It's always the speed, because players hate to be seen as slow.”
Like Dias, Kyle Walker has also taken public umbrage with his stats. The England and Manchester City right-back is known for his speed but wasn’t happy that his pace was ‘only’ 92 last season and that he wasn’t included in a list of fastest FIFA players. He went straight to Instagram, posting a story with the hashtag ‘#WheresKyle?’ then a ‘missing’ poster with ‘Last seen: FIFA 22, Pace 92?’ Light-hearted, but a nerve had obviously been touched. Last year, his teammates Phil Foden and Kevin de Bruyne showed Walker a fake card in which his pace was only 78. He threw it in the bin.
“I’ve heard Man United and England players talking about FIFA ratings,” says Rod Thornley, who was at the heart of the dressing rooms in his work as a masseur for both United and the country. “I’ve heard players saying, ‘How the hell have they put my pace at that when I’m a lot quicker!’ It’s contentious every single year and I’ve seen players say, ‘I need to speak to them about this.’ Still, I’ve never heard a player complain that their marks are too high, either.”
It’s not just fans that will have eagerly awaited this week’s release of FIFA 23 – the latest instalment in what is the sixth best-selling video game franchise of all time – with its latest improvements to developer EA Sports’ HyperMotion gameplay tech, the debut of women’s club football and a future updates to tie in with both the Qatar 2022 and Australia/New Zealand 2023 World Cups. Playing FIFA is the norm among pro footballers with ample time to fill between training sessions or when stuck in hotel rooms ahead of a match day. Like almost every other aspect of their lives, things can get very competitive, very quickly. Especially since those who spend untold hours with the game understand that perception can quickly become reality for its players.
“My kids know every stat about every player,” says Thornley. “If I mention a centre-forward for Napoli, they’ll say, ‘Oh, he’s got 94 pace’. What I’d like to know is how FIFA fix on the ratings. Are they watching all the games? How are they deciding if a player is getting quicker or slower? Is there a science to it?” EA and FIFA insist the ratings are independently verified via a real-life scouting network that both attends matches in-person and watches them back on tape.
“For the more established players, they get pretty wound up about their ratings,” Matthew Moore, from Centre Circle Consultants, the commercial agent of USA captain Christian Pulisic and other players. “Or they get overly excited. Victor Wanyama was very proud of his ratings. While Adebayo Akinfenwa didn’t get to the top in football (he played most of his football in England’s third tier) but on FIFA he was a hero with super strength, more than any other player. I think that helped his image and profile. And that helped him commercially.”
For the younger players, Moore tells GQ, just getting a card means you are on the up. “It’s a momentous occasion for our younger clients, even if their ratings are low. It’s like they’ve arrived in football, a school report which you’re not going to be told off by your parents for but proof you belong in professional football.”
Those players who rise up to the top become ambassadors of the game and are given a special presentation box with a card and their ratings and a customised game showing how many goals people playing as them have scored. Lionel Messi scores hundreds of millions of goals per season – with someone else in control.
But change is afoot after EA Sports ended its marriage with FIFA in May. FIFA was reportedly seeking $1 billion across a four-year cycle to renew its license for the game, a fee far in excess of its value to EA. Moore is, like the rest of football, waiting to see how the ratings change next year, when FIFA and EA stop working together and the series takes up a new name in EA Sports FC. “I’ve worked with EA Sports through our players; they’re a smart, cutting-edge, company that is open to trying new things like putting Ted Lasso in the game with his AFC Richmond team. They collaborate, they incorporate, they’re cool.” One of those innovations was to send players commemorative plaques of their ratings and stats, but that caused even more of a stir.
“When FIFA started to give out plaques and we saw them appearing in the dressing room, the banter went up a level,” Danny Simpson remembers from his time at Leicester City. “When those big plaques appeared with some players, the others started winding them up. We had Jamie Vardy and his pace was 93 when we won the league. That wasn’t a lie. He was so fast that when we did warm-ups – he’d have already have turned around in 15-metre sprints before anyone else got to the pole.”
As much as EA Sports FC will be trying its damndest to present itself as a brand new proposition next year, you can be sure these arguments will keep rumbling on for many seasons to come. Although the drama over FIFA ratings may be a reasonably new phenomenon, the fragile bravado of elite sportspeople is as old as time.
“I played FIFA a little bit but I didn’t have a clue what my ratings were,” says former Manchester United defender Wes Brown. “We just concentrated on winning real trophies…but if my tackling was low, then it should have been higher.”
