The 25 best football games ever

The 25 best football games ever

Think football games begin and end with the latest edition of FIFA? Think again. Over the years there have been countless top footy games, from basic 8-bit kickabouts to exhaustive, life-sapping management sims. But which ones are the best? Whether you agree or disagree with our list, we hope it’ll spark plenty of memories. Let the arguments begin…

25) Ultimate Soccer Manager (1995, Amiga)

For all of Championship Manager’s statistical goodness, nothing immersed you in a mid-’90s football world like the USM series. Transfers and team selection almost became minor distractions, as you reclined in your office next to a fax machine and Teletext. There were advertising deals to negotiate, a stadium complex to build, and even bungs to offer the opposition. Yes, this was the George Graham era, when managers were unimpeachable emperors, and USM put you right on the throne with a hotline to football’s dark side.

24) Footballer of the Year (1986, ZX Spectrum)

People weren’t sure what to make of this oddball at the time of release. Part management game, part board game, you aimed to take a kid from the old fourth division to the glory of cup finals and Division One. Success was mostly down to scoring goals in arcade sequences; chances were bought with ‘goal cards’ purchased in-game, and ‘incident cards’ enabled you to delve further into your young player’s life. If this all sounds a bit familiar, FOTY was a big influence on New Star Soccer creator Simon Read…

23) Tracksuit Manager (1988, C64)

We’re not sure how you manage a tracksuit; stupid name aside, this Goliath Games effort was an impressive management game with depth. You arrived just as your team (England by default) had a disastrous World Cup (so, pretty accurate), and had to figure out a road to success. Highlights were akin to the running commentary you’d today see on a news website, and while that lacked visual impact, it provided plenty of insight into who was providing the goods for your team, and who to send for an early bath.

22) Score! World Goals (2012, iOS/Android)

Score! is the weirdest entry in this list, being a combination of goal highlights and the path-drawing mechanic first popularised by Flight Control on the iPhone. The idea was to recreate classic goals, step-by-step, closely following the path the ball took at the time. This might have resulted in a stiff, unforgiving title, but World Goals was a surprisingly satisfying puzzler, so it’s a shame it only exists as Score! Hero now, which ditches the historical element in favour of guiding a young hopeful to stardom instead.

21) International Soccer (1983, C64)

This C64 classic was the first truly great soccer game. Inspired by the earlier Intellivision Soccer, it utilised a side-on viewpoint, and had two seven-a-side teams battling it out for a chunky, pixelated cup. Despite creator Andrew Spencer not being a fan of football, he captured the feel of the sport, and squeezed throw-ins, corners and goal-kicks into the cartridge’s tiny memory. It’s also the one football game where you can sometimes head a ball half the length of the field – a bug Spencer noticed but left in because he thought it was funny.

20) Match Day II (1987, ZX Spectrum)

Knowing a good thing when they saw it, Jon Ritman and Ocean teamed up for a sequel to Ritman’s original Spectrum smash hit. This time, the players looked a lot like bodybuilders, and the underlying mechanics had been suitably beefed up: along with a far superior deflection system, there was a league format, volleys, flicks and jumping. Shot strength was determined by a slightly awkward oscillating ‘kickometer’ and the pace was again slow, but this merely made for more strategic play.

19) Actua Soccer (1995, PS1)

Its name and tagline may have been a shot across Sega’s bows (“There’s nothing virtual about Actua”), but Gremlin Interactive’s title was noteworthy for more than just a bit of snide trolling: it was the very first console football game to offer fully 3D players. These were motion-capped from Sheffield Wednesday stalwarts Chris Woods, Andy Sinton and Graham Hyde, providing a level of clogger realism never before witnessed on consoles.

18) Pro Evolution Soccer 2017 (2016, PS4/Xbox One)

Having spent years in FIFA’s shadow, Pro Evolution Soccer 2017 finally offered a genuine alternative to EA’s annual juggernaut. PES 2017 was a slower, more considered version of the beautiful game, with less emphasis on beating players for pace and more on patient build-up play, but when everything fell into place and you unlocked a defence the sense of satisfaction was glorious. Its lack of official licenses and a fundamentally flawed online mode still made it very hard to convince most FIFA fans to jump ship, although EA still hasn’t managed to replicate the game’s killer crosses. Maybe this year…

17) Kick Off (1989, Amiga)

Dino Dini’s 16-bit classic added an ingredient that hadn’t really been seen before in football games: speed. The little players darted about the pitch like they were dosed-up on something decidedly dodgy, and the ball was initially impossible to control, given that it didn’t remain glued to your feet. But once mastered, Kick Off made every other football game suddenly seem dull and dated by comparison, even if it was at times the football game equivalent of juggling bars of soap while riding a unicycle down a slide.

16) World Cup 98 (1997, PS1)

Back in 1998 FIFA was one of several games vying for the hearts and minds of floppy fringed teens. 1997’s Road To World Cup 98 finally had the gameplay to go with its official licences, but World Cup 98 built on it in some style, keeping the free-flowing football of the previous title and adding in-game tactical changes. It was all wrapped up in a slick World Cup skin that no other game at the time came close to, complete with commentary and unlockable classic games. Shame we had to put up with Chumbawamba every time it loaded though.

15) Football Manager (1982, ZX Spectrum)

Kevin Toms graced the front of Addictive’s Football Manager cover, enticing you to buy the game with his charm and beard. And what a game it was: on your little Spectrum, you could buy and sell players, pick a team, and watch highlights on pitches with comically large goals. Today, it all looks a bit primitive (the C64 conversion was at least a bit prettier), and yet its simple gameplay remains surprisingly compelling in an era of over-complicated (micro) management sims. If you fancy a go on your smartphone, check out Toms’s remakes for Android and iOS.

14) Tehkan World Cup (1985, arcade)

Tehkan World Cup wasn’t the first overhead football game (that accolade probably goes to Exciting Soccer), but it was the first to make that viewpoint work. This was a fast game, in part down to the trackball controls, and decent goalies also ensured that matches were often frantic end-to-end battles. The game very heavily influenced Sensible Software, and more or less came to the C64 in the form of Microprose Soccer, but its legacy was really being the grandfather to the outstanding Sensible Soccer series.

13) New Star Soccer (2012, iOS/Android)

In answering the question “How do you create an in-depth career-long football game for mobile devices?”, New Star Soccer just says “You don’t!”, and instead serves up a selection of mini-games draped over a basic framework that’s not a million miles from 1986’s Footballer Of The Year. Although a touch cash-hungry, it’s a mobile classic, having you balance a kind of hyper-real version of a young footballer’s life (Buy a car! And now a TANK!) with pitch-based exploits and the demands of a boss, advertisers and a nagging partner. A modern classic.

12) FIFA 10 (2009, PS3/Xbox 360)

Throughout the ‘00s, anyone with any sense knew Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer was the superior football game, despite its continued lack of proper team and player names. But when EA introduced 360-degree player control in FIFA 10 everything changed. The entire pitch opened up, giving you more freedom to take on defenders and slide passes through at just the right angle for your striker to run on to them. Coupled with a wealth of game modes, FIFA 10 was a more complete footballing experience than any previous title in the series and finally edged ahead of its rival too. And it hasn’t been toppled since.

11) International Superstar Soccer (1994, SNES)

In hindsight, this SNES classic is a bridge between classic-era side-on fare and modern football titles. A predecessor to PES, the original ISS offered a stunning array of moves – everything from feints to shoulder charges – when various buttons were combined. Visually, it was also leagues beyond the likes of Match Day and International Soccer. Yet for all its gloss and cleverness, what made ISS appeal most was its fun and frantic nature, retaining a very arcade sensibility, in that brief period before sports titles became totally obsessed with a kind of TV-style realism.

10) Virtua Striker (1994, arcade)

Sega’s legendary AM2 team (also responsible for Daytona USA and Virtua Fighter) developed this groundbreaking title – the first football video game in history to use 3D player models. Being available only in arcades, Virtua Striker was designed for fast and furious action over serious simulation, but for those of us who crammed countless coins into the cabinet, it was the most realistic digital appropriation of the beautiful game we’d ever seen.

9) Emlyn Hughes International Soccer (1988, C64)

A spiritual successor to Andrew Spencer’s International Soccer, Emlyn Hughes International Soccer was the last great side-on football game of the 1980s. Brimming with options, advanced players could utilise techniques such as ‘5-direction’ passing, sliding tackles and backheels, all from a joystick with only a single fire button. The result was the first truly fluid football game, where you could string together some genuinely breathtaking moves. The goalies were still rubbish, though, natch.

8) Football Manager 2011 (2010, PC)

In its divorce with Eidos, Sports Interactive lost the Championship Manager name but carried on creating the only management games worth playing – and this edition is one of the greatest, adding a full 3D engine that, if you were so inclined, allowed you to watch every single pass, shot, tackle and horrendous goalkeeping error in a match. Among the other innovations were press conferences – a small detail that served to add colour to an already frighteningly real football universe that featured no fewer than 117 playable leagues.

7) Kick Off 2 (1990, Amiga)

Kick Off 2 looked an awful lot like its predecessor, and it was really a combination of Kick Off and a couple of expansion disks, all carefully refined. But that attention to detail transformed an enjoyable but occasionally uncontrollable knockabout title into a product that demanded a lot more skill. Along with tournaments, refs with varying moods and – crucially – fewer bugs, this Amiga sequel dropped the pace and boosted the controls, copious use of ‘aftertouch’ enabling you to fashion the kind of dazzlingly audacious shots of which even Matt Le Tissier would have been proud.

6) Sensible Soccer (1992, Amiga)

Sensible Soccer was the developer’s attempt to bring to gaming the feeling of how you imagined playing professional football would be, coupled with the kind of attention to detail only a true football geek possesses (including correct hair and skin colour for each of the players). The game zoomed the viewpoint out, showing more of the pitch and enabling it to dispense with a Kick Off-style radar; passing and shooting were simplified and streamlined and everything was done on the frame, making the game extremely responsive. Until sequel SWOS arrived, this was the pinnacle of the genre.

5) ISS Pro Evolution (1999, PS1)

ISS Pro Evolution is responsible for introducing Master League mode to the world, bolting a decent career sim on to an already superb football game. You could buy and sell players using points earned by winning games, without any of the complicated day-to-day stuff you had to deal with in Championship Manager. That would have meant nothing if the gameplay hadn’t matched up to it but ISS Pro Evolution was already creeping ahead of FIFA by this time; it was more realistic yet also more playable – and that’s a winning combination in any game.

4) Championship Manager: Season 97/98 (1997, PC)

Despite being derided by small-minded dullards as a glorified spreadsheet, Championship Manager’s masterful tactical engine, reams of accurate data and giant player database wove together a rich, convincing football universe that sat parallel to our own. And it was so, so addictive: the game’s official forums were full of tales of lives all but lost to Champ’s particular brand of “just one more game”-itis, or grown men so proud of taking a lower league team to the FA Cup final that they would don a suit for the occasion.

3) FIFA 18 (2017, PS4/Xbox One)

Recent FIFA games have been all about tweaking a winning formula rather than any major overhauls, but considering the series has been building from a leading position since FIFA 10, that’s no bad thing. EA took the major trend of world football in recent years and built FIFA 18 around it, with significant emphasis on quick breaks and lightning fast counter attacks. That can make online matches a little too gung-ho, particularly when playing with the best teams, but it also means there are fewer stodgy 0-0 draws. And that’s got to be a good thing, right?

2) Pro Evolution Soccer 5 (2005, PS2)

We could have picked any of the four games from Pro Evo 2 to Pro Evo 5 and made a case for its inclusion but instead we’ve picked the probable highest point in a series of very high points. The Master League had by now developed into a proper four-division set-up, with promotion, relegation and a Champions League equivalent and there were, finally, proper player names. On the gameplay side, it was as fluid and playable as football games get. Not quite as frantically insane as Sensible Soccer, not quite as gloriously detailed as FIFA 18, but a wonderful mid-way between the two extremes.

1) Sensible World Of Soccer (1994, Amiga)

Nearly 25 years young, SWOS is still top of the league. It took everything that was great about Sensible Soccer and ran with it. You got the same fantastic arcade-oriented gameplay but with 1500 teams to trade players with and 144 competitions to take part in. Can it compete with FIFA for realistic gameplay or Football Manager for exhaustive statdom? No, obviously not but for sheer “JUST LOOK AT THAT GOAL! THAT WAS LIQUID FOOTBALL!” joy, it will never be bettered. Go on, then, just one more game.