This reminds me of an article I read a while back about (American) football coaches getting plays from NFL video games, essentially using all of Xbox Live / Play Station Network as a simulator. Unfortunate that I can't find the article.
In particular, they quoted one actual NFL player who was running to score the winning touchdown with seconds left to go - but the score would not be so large that the opposing team couldn't steal the victory on the last possession. He ran to the 1 yard line and juked laterally across the field to run out the clock, basing the technique on similar theatrics in the Madden game.
But I'm not sure if it's exactly the one I read years ago. It doesn't talk as much about strategy as I remember, and no mention of juking, so it's probably not yours. There's likely at least one more out there.
I'm curious if videogame playing athletes do better than their non-gamer colleagues.
I'm a huge fan of football (playing and watching) but I cannot stand any of the games after about FIFA 2000. This isn't a nostalgia thing, I was about 14 when I realised this. In pretty much all of the games I've played the players move so slowly and dribble the ball very clumsily - kick step-step-step, change direction, kick step-step-step ... - it's like how 10 year old kids play. Goalkeepers taking a goal kick (or kicking from hand) barely reach the halfway line - when even a hungover sunday league keeper in real life can do so. Shots on goal are a complete roll of the dice, there's no real skill to it that I can discern (unless you can beat a couple of defenders and get a 1-on-1). I could keep listing my frustrations, but I suspect I'm alone so I'll stop :)
I have no idea why professional footballers can stomach FIFA/PES and aren't infuriated by it.
I get that realism isn't the goal (nice) but it's frustrating to me that the players felt slow like they're running through a peat bog and the keeper can't kick the ball :)
But you're right, I haven't spent more than an hour with any of the games since '99 (most recently FIFA '16 came with my PS4) so I'm definitely not very skilled at all!
The article also talks about Football Manager(FM) which is a completely different thing. A lot of clubs use the scouting database from FM, and many managers play the game as well.
What's the latest version you've tried? I've always enjoyed FIFA even knowing it's an arcade-y approximation of the real thing. These days though, players don't run "on rails" like they used to, and everything feels a lot less jarring. Same for PES (or better depending on your faction). I still play with a niggling feeling of "this isn't quite right" but enjoy it enough to play it anyway.
When you make heavy use of the "skill moves" - the game becomes much more dynamic. I could see your frustration that without these it's slightly a point and dribble in your direction fest, although I think the newer versions of the game have drastically improved upon this. And I have to respectfully disagree that shots are a roll of the dice - if you play some really skilled people (think top divisions in Ultimate Team), I've gotten crushed without the opponent even entering the 18.
Maybe you'll feel like me when I watch some very old soccer games (Atari era) where the ball is almost entirely free. It makes things much more dynamic and vibrant. Probably 10x more tedious (I was too young to have such games at the time). But it seems closer in spirit to what I felt on the field.
I stopped playing video games in the early 2000s, games post PES 2003 had no more appeal to me, it was a bad blend to new tech and less fun. I missed the arcade sim of first PlayStation PES (and yes, official names didn't matter).
have you played the latest games? trying not to sound like a fanboy but they play great. the most fun you have, just like in 5 a-side, is just trying tricks out and mugging people off! like the article says, "The reaction to them among professionals suggests they are succeeding". I mean if it gets the thumbs up from professionals they must be doing something right, just sounds like you just simply don't enjoy the game.
The only way I can see someone observing what you describe in FIFA 16 is if you're playing it without having taken the time to learn the controls. Can keepers kick the ball into the other half? Certainly. Some can even throw the ball into the other half (Neuer). There are so many ways to dribble with the ball other than the static movements you described and it's extremely fluid (even more this year in FIFA 17 with the new FrostBite engine). The only part I can somewhat agree with is shots being somewhat random, but having an RNG (random number generator) element in a sports game is pretty much unavoidable. There is a skill element to shooting, but depending on the individual skill level of the player you're taking the shot with, the result of that shot will vary.
As the GM of a amateur youth team (one of the parents has to do this role here), I've watched the coaches trying in despair to make players unlearn things that the boys picked up from playing the FIFA series games.
Mostly it's about tricks that are much more prominent in the video game than they ever can be in real life, because the gameplay is not entirely realistic. The gameplay on screen rewards visual stunts that are much less effective in real play. The movement of ball and players doesn't actually have to be like it is in reality, because it is a video game. It's adjusted for visual appeal.
Where this is most often seen is passing the ball up in the air; this enables the video game to show amazing slow-motion captures of skill, but on a real football field such gameplay is not effective; in fact it is stupid.
In video gameplay, the characters make the ball traverse in a slo-mo arch, all the other moving objects maybe slow down, and the player receiving this pass then picks it up with amazing skill.
In real gameplay, it is better to keep the ball on the ground and pass quickly. A ball flying in an arch in the air travels more slowly, so the opponent has time to come close end press the ball; a flying ball is more difficult to control so it is slower to receive and pass on; making an accurate pass with a ball up in the air is much more difficult than controlling a ball rolling on the ground.
Thus, playing like FIFA just means you lose the ball to the opponents and you lose the game.
Also, things like a bicycle kick tend to succeed in a video game, but in real life they are exceedingly difficult to score with.
Thanks for the clip. That was great. You can see everyone briefly relax when the keeper deflects the initial shot. They thought the pressure was gone.. and then BOOM.
Of course, yes, but about nine times out of ten a better attempt would have been made with a simple header or by passing the ball downwards. Football is a team sport. It's great to be able to score from a difficult position. But it's much better to keep your eyes open, know where your teammates are, and pass to someone who is in a better position.
Which, nine times out of then, means not crossing the ball in the first place. Although now I look upthread, that's pretty much what you're advocating.
I enjoy any technique that looks that absurd when it goes slightly wrong. Flying headers are particularly beautiful - you just get a player sailing across the field into nothing in particular.
Repeatedly losing the ball is not only not fun, it is painful for teammates to watch someone waste opportunity after opportunity in an attempt to create highlights, and it is boring for the parents to watch.
You should have fun, but you should also teach real skills. You seem to have confused the statements "winning isn't the only goal" and "winning isn't a goal".
It depends on the age. My children have done some soccer at 4-5, and at that age, yeah it's just a fancy way of running around.
But as the kids get older, if winning and losing isn't on the table at all... what's the point? Why can't we use our hands? It's not like it affects the nonexistant outcome. Why are we chasing the balls instead of just running around on the playground? It's not like it affects the nonexistant out come. Why are we... non-existant outcome... etc. The whole activity has no foundation whatsoever if there's no victory state, and kids do eventually notice.
Yeah, some people get way too excited about it. This is not the dominant problem that I see; I see more people entirely destroying all reason to play the game at all by trying to remove the pain of loss, at the cost of the thrill of victory, any reason to work on improving oneself, and any reason to even be playing at all.
What do you think of Hackeysack? It seems to have all of the characteristics of the "no point anymore without a winner" but people still don't use their hands, they still socialize and have fun and have a (reasonable) thrill of doing well and the pain of messing up.
I think that it doesn't have nationwide programs for every grade, with local tournaments running up to international tournaments, taught in school, and such a large part of our culture that we all know what a "soccer mom" is even as soccer still hasn't really taken over as our dominant national sport.
Not everything has to be competitive. I mean, duh, right? But taking an activity that was designed to be competitive and then trying to strip out the competitive part isn't a good idea. Far better to start over again and design something not competitive from the get-go.
I've only played Hackeysack a few times, but it seems like 'losing' was equated to 'messing up' and 'winning' was equated to 'not messing up'. The victory conditions are different, and you and your team are playing against yourselves, but the concept of victory is still there.
I'd rather play a good game and lose, than play a lopsided game and win.
I even remember once in my 20s in a local basketball league, we only had four players show up one night, including one fat guy who didn't run and couldn't shoot. We defeated our opponents who had a full bench and a couple of subs, who on a normal night were only slightly below our team's ability at normal strength. Rather than feeling elated that we defeated a full team when we were almost at half-strength, we felt bad for our fellow team, that they had such a bad night that they were defeated in such a way.
Winning is fun and a rush, absolutely, but I've had plenty of boring wins and plenty of awesome losses - there's more interest in a good challenge than a win, per se. If you distill the success of the game (in a local league, at least), just down to win/loss, you're doing it wrong, IMO.
I think you bring it on in a bit too negative way, but indeed, many people have competitive drive and when we speak about 16 to 19 year olds playing in a competitive team, most have quite a bit of that drive, so a foolish team-mate who loses games is frustrating.
For kids under 12 or so the first objective is to keep them in the game; too many players give up under the pressure of yelling coaches and parents that care more about results than anything. We don't need a "everyone is a winner"; children are naturally competitive and enjoy winning, what we don't need is a "win at all costs" mentality in youth sports, you can both develop a player and a person. In youth soccer you can "cheat" players of their development by focusing on strategies that will win you games.
20 year olds don't play in leagues coached by parents. It's fine for leagues to be competitive. However, for the most part, it's the parents who care about winning and losing in the leagues for young kids, not the kids themselves.
Not sure why you're getting down-voted. I think people are confusing "fun comes first" with winning not mattering at all.
For young kids, the focus should be on fun (otherwise they won't play) and skills development (fundamentals). Of course you try to win the game, but the idea is that you don't try to win at all cost, especially at the expense of those other two things.
The strategy you would employ with a team of kids to win as many games as possible is very different from the one you would use to develop them the most as good future players.
but... the kids are playing the game... they are playing fifa like they play in real life and vice versa. Just sounds to me like they are learning the game and making mistakes in both.
Sure, and it's pretty all right when they are young kids playing for fun.
When it's boys nearing adulthood supposedly playing more seriously, a few of them dreaming about pro careers, it looks silly and is frustrating to observe.
One essential thing to learn when you study football is that you have to respect and listen to your coach and also the teammates: don't lose the ball stupidly.
> The gameplay on screen rewards visual stunts that are much less effective in real play. The movement of ball and players doesn't actually have to be like it is in reality, because it is a video game.
* Edit: For the donwvoters: I used to play college-level football in the US and Brazil, and these kinds of plays are commonplace in Brazil. Kids learn to dribble before they even learn how to run. This is part of Brazilian culture: a player who can dribble is much more valued than one who can shoot or pass accurately.
For every clip or montage of beautifully executed flair, there are tens or hundreds of hours of unrecorded or unpublished mistakes. I have a few hundred hours of recorded gameplay footage. I could make plenty of highlight reels out of the footage, but the mistakes eclipse the fancy by a wide margin.
If you're advocating that kids play more in the streets, practising these motor skills coupled with actual competitive decision making, then I absolutely agree. But these sorts of skills coupled with bad decision making gives you incredibly frustrating players like Ross Barkley.
There have always been kids who wanted to play sports the fancy way, with flair, long before video games. Especially at the youth level, you'll just get a lot of kids who value creativity and self expression over what the most winning strategy is.
I play FIFA (and soccer IRL) quite a bit and the highest level players (yes, there are professional FIFA players) actually play the game much closer to what you're referring to as the optimal style of play: short ground passes, keeping possession, playing backwards to keep possession, very little trying to beat your man one-on-one, creating chances by making runs, defending by jockeying your man without gambling, and good shots from good positions. At a high level, it's well understood by players that most scoring opportunities are created by causing the opposing team to lose their defensive shape through probing passes and runs, and then capitalizing on that space. Of course FIFA is not a simulation and can't be fully realistic - you're generally fitting a 90 minute soccer match into about 12 minutes of real life gameplay.
What you're describing sounds like typical youth behavior, but you're blaming it on video games. Before video games, kids would try to do things they saw their pro idols do on television as well. It didn't ruin the game.
Kinda random, but is there a guide for FIFA for someone who doesn't know how to actually play soccer? I very much enjoy playing with my brother, but neither of us understand 80% of the vocab, so the usual video game trick of "go look at the controls, find out what's available to you" isn't even useful. We'd both love to get better but we don't really have the time to invest in learning a whole sport and all the vocab that goes with it. I've searched youtube and google, but haven't found anything to help.
I would recommend searching the r/FIFA subreddit. There is a ton of stuff on there that is childish (it is a game played mostly by kids after all), but every so often one of the better players will post a thorough guide on how to emulate their playstyle. Be forewarned about how much FIFA players like to complain about the game.
I would suggest going to /r/bootroom on Reddit and asking for some help there. It's a subreddit catered to getting better at soccer. I'm sure they'd be glad to help with any vocabulary questions, even if you never plan on playing the game in real life.
It's not flair though if you are doing a rabona because you saw your favourite player do it the other day.
Genuine flair is the ability to do the unexpected. At best, these games open our eyes to these possibilities. At worst, they teach style over substance, and our game is poorer as a result.
I would argue that it is flair, because it's a move you don't see on the pitch very often (and with good reason). It's almost always unnecessary and a way of saying "Hey, look at me!". Maybe you're saying it's not original? I would agree with that.
al creativity starts with learning the moves, the tropes, and getting inspired. There's a reason Brahms' 1st symphony sounds like Beethoven that it's often called Beethoven's 10th, but his 5th much less so...
>>There have always been kids who wanted to play sports the fancy way, with flair, long before video games.
I had a friend who was a boxing coach in the sixties and seventies and he told me about all the young lads that tried to box like Muhammad Ali, but with painful consequences.
Right around the time kids gain enough coordination to reliably move a ball, they start wanting to emulate the most creative techniques the sport offers. I don't think that can be laid on FIFA.
I remember learning the Cruyff turn before I could cleanly dribble down an open field. It was fancy and an obvious display of skill, so everyone wanted to do it - even though it's a useless technique if your control and acceleration aren't perfect.
If anything can be chalked up to video games, I would expect it to be aerial passing and a reluctance to play back. The rest - fancy moves and beating defenders - has been an ego issue since long before FIFA.
> Before video games, kids would try to do things they saw their pro idols do on television as well.
I agree with this. Beeing from Argentina back when we played in the neighborhood there was always a kid pretending to be Maradona who wanted to solo score from mid-field or make a luxury goal :p
> the highest level players (yes, there are professional FIFA players) actually play the game much closer to what you're referring to as the optimal style of play: short ground passes, keeping possession, playing backwards to keep possession, very little trying to beat your man one-on-one, creating chances by making runs, defending by jockeying your man without gambling, and good shots from good positions
I played the NHL series of games at a high level for a while and saw a lot of what you describe there, too. Tons of people just trying to run it up the ice and hammer away at the goal, but if you played it akin to how an actual hockey game is played you'd see a lot of opportunities open up.
I think it's pretty hard to get into a "playing to win" mindset at any age. At least it is/was for me, it's hard to let go of the joy of winning through clever or flashy moves and focus on the joy of winning a high level competition, where everyone is playing to win.
"I once played a scrub who was actually quite good. That is, he knew the rules of the game well, he knew the character matchups well, and he knew what to do in most situations. But his web of mental rules kept him from truly playing to win. He cried cheap as I beat him with “no skill moves” while he performed many difficult dragon punches. He cried cheap when I threw him five times in a row asking, “Is that all you know how to do? Throw?” I gave him the best advice he could ever hear. I told him, “Play to win, not to do ‘difficult moves.’”"
Part of the issue with this is that a lot of games get very boring when you treat them seriously and people do not originally get into them for those boring parts.
This. A friend of mine plays paintball (skirmish). He said the way to win is to hide during the whole game and slowly crawl towards your objective. But, it's way more fun to go in guns ablazing like Rambo.
Kids will still emulate semi-impossible things done by pro players even if it wasn't for FIFA so I'm not sure (nor do I think the article makes a particularly convincing case) the video game is to blame here. These long passes and traps are not from a video game:
I don't know if FIFA Is the true source of the "stupidity" ... I mean, who doesn't want to try using the things you've been goofing around with in your own backyard. I remember visualizing myself as Ken Griffey Jr when playing baseball, who isn't pretending they are Lionel Messi in soccer.
This reminds me of the kids trying to hit homeruns on an 0 - 2 count in baseball. They'll learn.
Its kids learning the game, and kids being kids rather than simply being chess pieces for a 40 year old dad.
I take deep issue with anyone who refers to anything that kids do as 'stupidity'. They're kids playing a game. We have no idea what their home lives are like and we have no idea what the game represents to them. They're kids, not professionals and frankly, they deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Now, it depends on who are the "kids" here. You are possibly thinking of this in terms of American school activity soccer, and small children in general . I completely agree with you about 10-year-olds.
I was writing in the context of 17-19 year old kids who have trained football for a dozen years and perhaps played advanced computer games for almost as long. It falls into category of the Einstein's quote about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Completely agree about "visual stunts" parts. You will find that there are world's best freestylers ( people who can do insane tricks with ball at their feet) who don't even make it to a 2nd division league.
And that's completely reasonable, because freestyling with ball is just a different sport. It can also be amazing to watch, some guys are incredibly skillful.
Great football players often could make some reasonable freestyling that impresses laymen, but they don't get even close to a dedicated spacialist. And the dedicated specialist will loose the ball in an actual game quickly, because in freestyling, you don't learn to shield from a tackle and you're probably not good at all in running 90 minutes.
Moreover, football is a game where you have 22 players on the pitch, and at most one player has total control of the ball at any one time. Most of the game play is moving without a ball - but still it's very important; particularly, defending is all about where you are and how you move, but also in attacking play, the ball-less players make the opportunities.
Honestly, it feels like the difference between synchronized and 'regular' swimming, or ice dancing and speed skating. The only difference is that freestyling hasn't been equally established as a distinct activity.
In every case, the regular sport requires some of the technique and control of the performance sport, but comes with a rigid demand for efficiency.
Yes definitely. It's just that to a normal person who doesn't know the sport, it might seem that being good at freestyle translated to being good at regular soccer/football.
These seem to be the challenges with u17 or u19 teams as well...
Perhaps the speed dribble is done by that time - whatever can be done - and the emphasis is on spacing when defending: "Get closer!" (or whatever the coach shouts in English, ours goes NÄRMARE!)
Der Ball ist rund und das Spiel dauert 90 Minuten. [1]
Everything else is just theory. One of those is o jogo bonito. Paid coaches are usually not so great a fan as a child among friends left themselves. In the end, objectively good players are in part objectively good because they've learned to receive aerial balls aerially and that enables them to play more quickly.
It's a case where kids are making themselves better despite the intentions of the adults taking charge. They're not just playing FIFA, their researching the moves on YouTube.
How interesting. Usually your teammates will kill you for flair that doesn't help. And if you do it repeatedly, you won't get called the next time the gang goes out to play.
Here's a story: Growing up in India, we'd play football on this muddy ground next to an open sewer. There's only one field and maybe six or seven teams so we'd play golden goal or ten minutes. You had ten minutes to score to stay, but if your opponent scored you have to join the back of the queue. If you boot the ball too hard, it falls in the sewer and it's on you to go retrieve it among the shit and piss and everyone has to remember not to head it until it's washed off. It's also about 37 to 40 degrees outside and there's no shade, so losing is no fun since you may have to wait half an hour for your next game.
Amusingly, this ends up defaulting to the possession game with short passes. Unfortunately, I wasn't very good at the game, and so I played RB and had to retrieve the ball from the sewer many times before I learned to be a little better with my ground passes. I never did get very good, but at least I stopped having to go get the ball.
Maybe a few tropical diseases will fix your kids right up.
I think the helicopter parenting debate could be reduced to just knowledge of consequences and systemic thinking. The situation you described was an excellent opportunity for you and your playmates to understand the consequences of play style and play environment as a messy real-world system.
This is something you don't get nearly as much of playing video games or going to the mall. So many of our experiences are curated, artificial, and fall far short of the real-world level of complexity.
> How interesting. Usually your teammates will kill you for flair that doesn't help. And if you do it repeatedly, you won't get called the next time the gang goes out to play.
Depends on the group. Where I grew up, style was the name of the game. It wasn't good enough to do a layup. You had to do a trick layup with a needless underhand, etc.
The problem is that there was always one or two players that were naturally gifted and played all day so they could do any trick they wanted. Then, everyone tries to do it to show they have chops, too.
Of course games are going to change the way people see the world. Any powerful form of media is going to be able to do this. This can work out for good or for ill.
I once had an interesting experience when referring to a bit of anthropology in a comment. I brought up the well known idea that the requirement for cooperation in traditional Japanese rice agriculture -- namely for the maintenance of irrigation -- had a strong influence on the egalitarian peasant side of Japanese culture. To this, an avid 4X game player replied in outrage, "AGRICULTURE!?" He then elaborated that he had been conditioned to think of it as the starting point on the tech tree, therefore base, basic, and completely insignificant. This is completely at odds with reality, however. There is a lot of skill and knowledge involved with agriculture, especially so when done with stone age technology.
Does this make games worse than other forms of media? No. You can find examples of screwed up ideas people pick up about things in all forms of media, going right back to ballads about princesses and war heroes in pre-literate cultures. However, I would say that the potential for both good and harm is especially strong with video, cinema, and games, because they can work on such a visceral level. (Also, is our culture as savvy with such effects from games, as it is about such effects from songs, novels, movies, and TV commercials? I think it's currently catching up.)
EDIT: Please don't automatically assume that I agree with the loudest voices when it comes to the analysis of media. I don't! Reality is complex and nuanced.
Well, you have really good players. Good players can carry a team, but they're not the same thing.
I found in the past when playing that players who are convinced of their own greatness could ruin the game; maybe still get a win, but that was never really what I cared for.
The lack of flair and ingenuity in youth soccer in America is why our teams are so bad. We drill kids in what we think are core fundamentals because we treat soccer like US Football instead of the fluid dynamic game that it is.
I'm surprised that you mention lob passes to support your case. While the gameplay footage in trailers may feature them prominently since they're fun to watch, I wouldn't say that the actual game usually rewards playing that way. I rely far more on ground passes in the game than the teams I follow (Manchester United and Real Salt Lake) do in real life since it's so much easier to retain possession that way.
This took me on a pleasant trip down memory lane. I remember my classmates were impressed by my moves in early 2002 when we played on a field in a remote location of our school field. I had FIFA 2002 to thank for it.
It's a testament to their database that many young players who are good these days were good on FM years ago (with some notable misses of course as well... Freddy Adu, I'm looking at you...)
The best games, like Football Manager, actually hire worldwide scouts !!! I know the one responsible for Uruguay, he has to turn in reports for hundreds of players.
He had some good hits and is actually asked by scouts. He also had some pretty big misses ("this Luis Suarez guy, he's not THAT good")
Very cool article! Makes me excited to eventually get back to work on a screenplay concept I had involving Madden, being a Texas High School / College / Professional gridiron football Coach (not international football like FIFA), and gambling. The nice part about my write-up/concept is that it can be adjusted for generation differences so it feels modern, or purposefully pinned to a time frame (ex: early 2000s) for a "period piece" type of thing.
As a long-time gear head I know that quite a few professional race drivers express appreciation for some of the simulators on the market currently. If anything for track memory assistance, because, well the 'Ring is almost 13 miles.
It is not really hard for EA to make more realistic football(soccer) game. The problem is, probably around 15% of the all FIFA gamers will enjoy the real experience while the rest will find it so difficult to play.
Their considerable amount of revenue comes from kids who loves to shoot, dribble, and do some skills without thinking about physical reality side of it.
> Their considerable amount of revenue comes from kids who loves to shoot, dribble, and do some skills without thinking about physical reality side of it.
Actually it comes from kids who love to open packs of cards.
Sensible Soccer / Kick Off 2 is still a winning style. One touch passing and kick it in front of you and run like mad and shoot as soon as you can. Works in real life as well.
Age 9 or 10 and moving to 11 a side on full size goals, shooting high was always a goal :) No need for even that slight kick off 2 curve. That was 30 years ago and they sensibly delay the move to those sized pitches and goals these days.
I'm 26 years old and have been playing soccer for 20 years. I've been playing FIFA since FIFA since '99 was released. I don't recall anything about the game influencing my on field play. Rather, it was the in real life playing affecting my video game playing, in terms of possession, when to keep it, when to go 1v1.
Now, this may not be true for everyone but I really looked at FIFA as an entirely separate thing from my real life playing of the game.
Perhaps it is more fans/casual players of the game that are being influenced by FIFA more so than more serious and experienced players. In Iwobi's case it may help them get a sense of who the player is but it's nothing compared to the scouting reports they go over with their managers in the days leading up to the game.
Interesting comment. I've played soccer from a young age, and I can definitely see online <--> offline experiences influencing each other.
The biggest area has to do with the use of space; when to expect other players to make runs, when to receive the ball and pivot and switch the sides. I of course would have those instincts from playing for real, but having gotten to do them in-game (with a nice top-down view) has helped me think about my play in real life.
One thing to try if you haven't - play a Fifa player career locked to a specific player. A lot of feels like real life - off the ball movement, finding space, when to call for a pass, etc. Obviously not 100% true to life but felt closer to real life than typical Fifa.
I tried playing that mode when it was first introduced to the series and I didn't much care for it at the time. The manager/bird's eye view is what was intriguing to me, transfers, seeing the game and implementing real time tactics and decisions.
>The biggest area has to do with the use of space; when to expect other players to make runs, when to receive the ball and pivot and switch the sides. I of course would have those instincts from playing for real, but having gotten to do them in-game (with a nice top-down view) has helped me think about my play in real life.
I get how this could be, but I learned so much more from my coaches, from what moves to learn, to when to make a run, when to make certain decisions. Anything I might have picked up from FIFA was subconscious.
At the end of the article, Football Manager (an extremely souped-up version of FIFA's manager mode) is briefly mentioned as having influenced data analysts and scouting. I wish they had dug into it more. The connection between video games and scouting seems more direct than the one to on-field play (until we get really good VR).
FM actually has a very very extensive player database and a large number of scouts who provide them with data. There are reports of popular clubs who use the FM database (and additional statistical analysis) to find out about players and so on. A slight tangent, there are teams like FC Midtjylland(Danish League) and Brentford(English second tier) who make extensive use of data (think Moneyball) to sign players, and have achieved moderate success.
It is incredibly difficult to move the field of football analytics forward, especially inside clubs, where despite the implication in the article it is decidedly rare. I've got no objections to the FM database as a possible template for scout reports, but it has nothing to do with analytics, and when people _say_ it does, and then somehow it doesn't work because you bought Ibrahima Bakayoko, it sets the field back even further.
Off-topic: It looks like the NY Times has gone full paywall. I can't read this story at all. I even tried to load it using the Google Search work-around and even that puts me into the login screen. Does everyone here have a NYT subscription or is it just me that is getting denied?
The same thing happened to me and opening the link in incognito mode allowed me to read it. I think I've used my quota of free articles for the month though.
I am a longtime amateur player, and a youth club coach of about 15 years, having assistant coached a US National Youth Futsal champion team. (I also played pickup after work with PG in Cambridge Back In The Day - I wonder if he still plays?) I would be cautious, however, in generalizing the article's first major point (the game as a simulation) from elite players to garden-variety players. Elite players must, of necessity, maintain and adhere to a perhaps game-specific strategy during the organized chaos of a match. I find, as a coach (vs player), without the distraction of a tired body, tired mind, and somebody trying to kick me, that it is much easier to keep this strategy at the forefront of my mind. My skills are also not so good that they require little conscious thought. So I think an elite player (as I am not) may, in fact, benefit by acting as a coach in these games. The second major point is about data influencing the real game. This is undoubtedly true. Soccer is a very mathematical, probabilistic game at heart, and there are many readily available resources for the technically inclined soccer enthusiast. I would recommen
This is the same story, where people think Steph Curry is bad for the game cause he jacks up impossible three pointers, and kids want to copy him.
It's always the same. When you're a kid, you want to do the flashy stuff like a guitar solo, you'll learn the basics later once you figure out how important they are.
In a strange way, I'm extremely relieved to see this. Having come from tons of soccer before touching FIFA, I can't play the game because I get so frustrated at the players behaving and acting against the unconscious instincts I have of how people will actually move (even after the perspective shift of on-the-field to top-down). I stopped complaining about this because some of my friends love FIFA and that's just being a spoil-sport, but next time I get stomped, I can explain why...with a source!
Not too surprising. Consider how flight simulators have changed flying. Any activity that is expensive/dangerous that can be simulated means the edit/compile/debug loop can be made much faster and cheaper, and thus more highly developed.
As co-founder of a sport startup I’ve had many conversations with my future customers. On many occasions I observed and talked to teenage football players about their behaviour on and off the pitch.
When it comes down to sharing their own sports data there’s undoubtedly a big gap between the live experience on the field and the conversation about it online. Apparently, there’s no need to highlight themselves to their friends with their match results, to post video’s of amazing actions or make a comparison with other players. In other words, talking about your own sport is too boring.
So, the sport definitely is changing because of esports and games. And it's great!
135 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadIn particular, they quoted one actual NFL player who was running to score the winning touchdown with seconds left to go - but the score would not be so large that the opposing team couldn't steal the victory on the last possession. He ran to the 1 yard line and juked laterally across the field to run out the clock, basing the technique on similar theatrics in the Madden game.
But I'm not sure if it's exactly the one I read years ago. It doesn't talk as much about strategy as I remember, and no mention of juking, so it's probably not yours. There's likely at least one more out there.
I'm curious if videogame playing athletes do better than their non-gamer colleagues.
I have no idea why professional footballers can stomach FIFA/PES and aren't infuriated by it.
But you're right, I haven't spent more than an hour with any of the games since '99 (most recently FIFA '16 came with my PS4) so I'm definitely not very skilled at all!
I stopped playing video games in the early 2000s, games post PES 2003 had no more appeal to me, it was a bad blend to new tech and less fun. I missed the arcade sim of first PlayStation PES (and yes, official names didn't matter).
Mostly it's about tricks that are much more prominent in the video game than they ever can be in real life, because the gameplay is not entirely realistic. The gameplay on screen rewards visual stunts that are much less effective in real play. The movement of ball and players doesn't actually have to be like it is in reality, because it is a video game. It's adjusted for visual appeal.
Where this is most often seen is passing the ball up in the air; this enables the video game to show amazing slow-motion captures of skill, but on a real football field such gameplay is not effective; in fact it is stupid.
In video gameplay, the characters make the ball traverse in a slo-mo arch, all the other moving objects maybe slow down, and the player receiving this pass then picks it up with amazing skill.
In real gameplay, it is better to keep the ball on the ground and pass quickly. A ball flying in an arch in the air travels more slowly, so the opponent has time to come close end press the ball; a flying ball is more difficult to control so it is slower to receive and pass on; making an accurate pass with a ball up in the air is much more difficult than controlling a ball rolling on the ground.
Thus, playing like FIFA just means you lose the ball to the opponents and you lose the game.
Also, things like a bicycle kick tend to succeed in a video game, but in real life they are exceedingly difficult to score with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA-AEEPol_8
You're coming from a place where winning seems to be the goal. For a kids' team shouldn't having fun come first?
But as the kids get older, if winning and losing isn't on the table at all... what's the point? Why can't we use our hands? It's not like it affects the nonexistant outcome. Why are we chasing the balls instead of just running around on the playground? It's not like it affects the nonexistant out come. Why are we... non-existant outcome... etc. The whole activity has no foundation whatsoever if there's no victory state, and kids do eventually notice.
Yeah, some people get way too excited about it. This is not the dominant problem that I see; I see more people entirely destroying all reason to play the game at all by trying to remove the pain of loss, at the cost of the thrill of victory, any reason to work on improving oneself, and any reason to even be playing at all.
Not everything has to be competitive. I mean, duh, right? But taking an activity that was designed to be competitive and then trying to strip out the competitive part isn't a good idea. Far better to start over again and design something not competitive from the get-go.
Looking clumsy or looking skillful is a consequence in and of itself.
It's like you have never even played California Games.
I even remember once in my 20s in a local basketball league, we only had four players show up one night, including one fat guy who didn't run and couldn't shoot. We defeated our opponents who had a full bench and a couple of subs, who on a normal night were only slightly below our team's ability at normal strength. Rather than feeling elated that we defeated a full team when we were almost at half-strength, we felt bad for our fellow team, that they had such a bad night that they were defeated in such a way.
Winning is fun and a rush, absolutely, but I've had plenty of boring wins and plenty of awesome losses - there's more interest in a good challenge than a win, per se. If you distill the success of the game (in a local league, at least), just down to win/loss, you're doing it wrong, IMO.
For young kids, the focus should be on fun (otherwise they won't play) and skills development (fundamentals). Of course you try to win the game, but the idea is that you don't try to win at all cost, especially at the expense of those other two things.
The strategy you would employ with a team of kids to win as many games as possible is very different from the one you would use to develop them the most as good future players.
Teaching ball control and possession are probably better suited for more organized, competitive leagues for older children.
When it's boys nearing adulthood supposedly playing more seriously, a few of them dreaming about pro careers, it looks silly and is frustrating to observe.
One essential thing to learn when you study football is that you have to respect and listen to your coach and also the teammates: don't lose the ball stupidly.
Ronaldinho would like to have a word with you.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IBERQ9abkk
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0ksVaLlaIw
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6mk0auHpis
* Edit: For the donwvoters: I used to play college-level football in the US and Brazil, and these kinds of plays are commonplace in Brazil. Kids learn to dribble before they even learn how to run. This is part of Brazilian culture: a player who can dribble is much more valued than one who can shoot or pass accurately.
But I do understand your feelings, since US football (or soccer as they call it) is more about about physical conditioning than skill.
This is true, but for athlete who takes the sport seriously, most of those mistakes are made during practice and not on match day.
I play FIFA (and soccer IRL) quite a bit and the highest level players (yes, there are professional FIFA players) actually play the game much closer to what you're referring to as the optimal style of play: short ground passes, keeping possession, playing backwards to keep possession, very little trying to beat your man one-on-one, creating chances by making runs, defending by jockeying your man without gambling, and good shots from good positions. At a high level, it's well understood by players that most scoring opportunities are created by causing the opposing team to lose their defensive shape through probing passes and runs, and then capitalizing on that space. Of course FIFA is not a simulation and can't be fully realistic - you're generally fitting a 90 minute soccer match into about 12 minutes of real life gameplay.
What you're describing sounds like typical youth behavior, but you're blaming it on video games. Before video games, kids would try to do things they saw their pro idols do on television as well. It didn't ruin the game.
Genuine flair is the ability to do the unexpected. At best, these games open our eyes to these possibilities. At worst, they teach style over substance, and our game is poorer as a result.
I had a friend who was a boxing coach in the sixties and seventies and he told me about all the young lads that tried to box like Muhammad Ali, but with painful consequences.
I remember learning the Cruyff turn before I could cleanly dribble down an open field. It was fancy and an obvious display of skill, so everyone wanted to do it - even though it's a useless technique if your control and acceleration aren't perfect.
If anything can be chalked up to video games, I would expect it to be aerial passing and a reluctance to play back. The rest - fancy moves and beating defenders - has been an ego issue since long before FIFA.
I agree with this. Beeing from Argentina back when we played in the neighborhood there was always a kid pretending to be Maradona who wanted to solo score from mid-field or make a luxury goal :p
I played the NHL series of games at a high level for a while and saw a lot of what you describe there, too. Tons of people just trying to run it up the ice and hammer away at the goal, but if you played it akin to how an actual hockey game is played you'd see a lot of opportunities open up.
Sirlin's (fighting game player / game designer) has a good book/series of articles about this that's made the front page a few times: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub
"I once played a scrub who was actually quite good. That is, he knew the rules of the game well, he knew the character matchups well, and he knew what to do in most situations. But his web of mental rules kept him from truly playing to win. He cried cheap as I beat him with “no skill moves” while he performed many difficult dragon punches. He cried cheap when I threw him five times in a row asking, “Is that all you know how to do? Throw?” I gave him the best advice he could ever hear. I told him, “Play to win, not to do ‘difficult moves.’”"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoviAc15Amk
This reminds me of the kids trying to hit homeruns on an 0 - 2 count in baseball. They'll learn.
Its kids learning the game, and kids being kids rather than simply being chess pieces for a 40 year old dad.
...and they almost made it past the Wildcard Playoff game.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/split.cgi?t=b&lg=M...
Even the Orioles had a low OPS in 0 - 2 counts.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/split.cgi?t=b&team=B...
basically, your approach should change in an 0 - 2 count:
http://www.ahittersedge.com/AboutUs/ArticlesBlog/tabid/4804/...
Doing it over and over in a game, even when your coach and teammates tell you not to, is stupidity...
I was writing in the context of 17-19 year old kids who have trained football for a dozen years and perhaps played advanced computer games for almost as long. It falls into category of the Einstein's quote about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH42LEhcV3Y (beware, the sound track is irritating)
Great football players often could make some reasonable freestyling that impresses laymen, but they don't get even close to a dedicated spacialist. And the dedicated specialist will loose the ball in an actual game quickly, because in freestyling, you don't learn to shield from a tackle and you're probably not good at all in running 90 minutes.
Moreover, football is a game where you have 22 players on the pitch, and at most one player has total control of the ball at any one time. Most of the game play is moving without a ball - but still it's very important; particularly, defending is all about where you are and how you move, but also in attacking play, the ball-less players make the opportunities.
In every case, the regular sport requires some of the technique and control of the performance sport, but comes with a rigid demand for efficiency.
a) spacing b) timing runs c) speed dribble
Perhaps the speed dribble is done by that time - whatever can be done - and the emphasis is on spacing when defending: "Get closer!" (or whatever the coach shouts in English, ours goes NÄRMARE!)
Everything else is just theory. One of those is o jogo bonito. Paid coaches are usually not so great a fan as a child among friends left themselves. In the end, objectively good players are in part objectively good because they've learned to receive aerial balls aerially and that enables them to play more quickly.
It's a case where kids are making themselves better despite the intentions of the adults taking charge. They're not just playing FIFA, their researching the moves on YouTube.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepp_Herberger
Here's a story: Growing up in India, we'd play football on this muddy ground next to an open sewer. There's only one field and maybe six or seven teams so we'd play golden goal or ten minutes. You had ten minutes to score to stay, but if your opponent scored you have to join the back of the queue. If you boot the ball too hard, it falls in the sewer and it's on you to go retrieve it among the shit and piss and everyone has to remember not to head it until it's washed off. It's also about 37 to 40 degrees outside and there's no shade, so losing is no fun since you may have to wait half an hour for your next game.
Amusingly, this ends up defaulting to the possession game with short passes. Unfortunately, I wasn't very good at the game, and so I played RB and had to retrieve the ball from the sewer many times before I learned to be a little better with my ground passes. I never did get very good, but at least I stopped having to go get the ball.
Maybe a few tropical diseases will fix your kids right up.
This is something you don't get nearly as much of playing video games or going to the mall. So many of our experiences are curated, artificial, and fall far short of the real-world level of complexity.
Depends on the group. Where I grew up, style was the name of the game. It wasn't good enough to do a layup. You had to do a trick layup with a needless underhand, etc.
The problem is that there was always one or two players that were naturally gifted and played all day so they could do any trick they wanted. Then, everyone tries to do it to show they have chops, too.
I once had an interesting experience when referring to a bit of anthropology in a comment. I brought up the well known idea that the requirement for cooperation in traditional Japanese rice agriculture -- namely for the maintenance of irrigation -- had a strong influence on the egalitarian peasant side of Japanese culture. To this, an avid 4X game player replied in outrage, "AGRICULTURE!?" He then elaborated that he had been conditioned to think of it as the starting point on the tech tree, therefore base, basic, and completely insignificant. This is completely at odds with reality, however. There is a lot of skill and knowledge involved with agriculture, especially so when done with stone age technology.
Does this make games worse than other forms of media? No. You can find examples of screwed up ideas people pick up about things in all forms of media, going right back to ballads about princesses and war heroes in pre-literate cultures. However, I would say that the potential for both good and harm is especially strong with video, cinema, and games, because they can work on such a visceral level. (Also, is our culture as savvy with such effects from games, as it is about such effects from songs, novels, movies, and TV commercials? I think it's currently catching up.)
EDIT: Please don't automatically assume that I agree with the loudest voices when it comes to the analysis of media. I don't! Reality is complex and nuanced.
Also, if you have kids who can accurately do bicycle kicks, then you have a really good team.
I found in the past when playing that players who are convinced of their own greatness could ruin the game; maybe still get a win, but that was never really what I cared for.
Winning is the only thing lol.
In any case, if you have good players on your team, it's better to build on that foundation.
Well that's the problem. Quit leaving half the team on the bench and only practicing in 10 second bursts.
He had some good hits and is actually asked by scouts. He also had some pretty big misses ("this Luis Suarez guy, he's not THAT good")
In Spanish:
http://www.aguantenche.com.uy/2014/08/el-trabajo-mas-lindo-d...
As a long-time gear head I know that quite a few professional race drivers express appreciation for some of the simulators on the market currently. If anything for track memory assistance, because, well the 'Ring is almost 13 miles.
Their considerable amount of revenue comes from kids who loves to shoot, dribble, and do some skills without thinking about physical reality side of it.
Actually it comes from kids who love to open packs of cards.
Now, this may not be true for everyone but I really looked at FIFA as an entirely separate thing from my real life playing of the game.
Perhaps it is more fans/casual players of the game that are being influenced by FIFA more so than more serious and experienced players. In Iwobi's case it may help them get a sense of who the player is but it's nothing compared to the scouting reports they go over with their managers in the days leading up to the game.
The biggest area has to do with the use of space; when to expect other players to make runs, when to receive the ball and pivot and switch the sides. I of course would have those instincts from playing for real, but having gotten to do them in-game (with a nice top-down view) has helped me think about my play in real life.
One thing to try if you haven't - play a Fifa player career locked to a specific player. A lot of feels like real life - off the ball movement, finding space, when to call for a pass, etc. Obviously not 100% true to life but felt closer to real life than typical Fifa.
>The biggest area has to do with the use of space; when to expect other players to make runs, when to receive the ball and pivot and switch the sides. I of course would have those instincts from playing for real, but having gotten to do them in-game (with a nice top-down view) has helped me think about my play in real life.
I get how this could be, but I learned so much more from my coaches, from what moves to learn, to when to make a run, when to make certain decisions. Anything I might have picked up from FIFA was subconscious.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-numbers-game-chris-ander...
to start. I also have a small number of articles I found interesting on my G+ soccer page
https://plus.google.com/u/0/101713908985994656356
It's always the same. When you're a kid, you want to do the flashy stuff like a guitar solo, you'll learn the basics later once you figure out how important they are.
Nothing to see here, move along.
A lot of his highlights are... ridiculous. Normal humans cannot embarass NBA level athletes like that.
Just like Fifa glorifies insane athletic moves.
How?
When it comes down to sharing their own sports data there’s undoubtedly a big gap between the live experience on the field and the conversation about it online. Apparently, there’s no need to highlight themselves to their friends with their match results, to post video’s of amazing actions or make a comparison with other players. In other words, talking about your own sport is too boring.
So, the sport definitely is changing because of esports and games. And it's great!