I know that, among the more online elements of the video game community, there's a certain amount of disdain for sports games. Eww, sports games, or lmao, sports games. Part of that is justified--asking $60 a year for what are becoming increasingly minimal updates to the underlying experience is bold, to say the least--but a lot of it isn't, because it misunderstands a huge element of what playing sports games is about.
Multiplayer is huge in sports games, whether it's some friends on the couch or online competitions bringing in billions in in-game transaction sales. But these games also ship with singleplayer modes, those modes are popular, and for many people they're popular for one big reason: they're dream factories.
Let me explain. Sport is cruel. There is usually only one winner, out of many, and so every season the odds of your team coming away with a trophy range from slim to astronomical to none. Doesn't matter where you are in the world or what sport you're following (or playing in a video game), the story is the same. Ask a Lions fan or a Mariners fan, a Suns fan or a Spurs fan and they'll share the same sad stories of what it's like following a team that rarely, if ever, wins anything.
That hurts! And it's a feeling that compounds annually. The more you see other teams winning, other fans enjoying themselves and revelling in the glory, the more your own team's failures and shortcomings become ever more apparent. You start to wonder, well:
Which brings me to Aston Villa Football Club, who I am bound to support through family ties (my great granddad played a few games for them, and my Nan was born around the corner from Villa Park, their home ground). Founded in 1874, Villa are one of the oldest, proudest and--over that entire timespan--most successful sides in English football. The problem is that a lot of that success is front-loaded into the earlier half of the club's 150-year existence, and for most of my lifetime they have swung wildly from plucky upstart to midtable irrelevance to flawed masterpiece.
In 1981 Villa won the English first division (which would later become the Premier League). In 1982 they went one better and were crowned champions of Europe after defeating German powerhouses Bayern Munich in the final of what was then called the European Cup (and is now the Champions League). It doesn't get any better than that! Villa remain one of only six English sides to ever win it, and topped the whole thing off by beating Barcelona in the European Super Cup not long after.
That's an incredible run of success, enough to sustain some fans for a lifetime, but I was two years old at the time, so it doesn't mean much to me outside of historical admiration. Instead, all I get to remember is what happened next. Villa were relegated from the first division in 1986, made it back to the first division in time to finish second in 1989/90 and again in 1992 (the first ever season of the Premier League), won a couple of League Cups in the mid-90s and then...all hell broke loose.
The 28 years following that last League Cup win in 1996 have seen rollercoaster league finishes, a bunch of lost cup finals, four different owners, another relegation, cabbage, late-season collapses, a player getting punched by a fan on the field and much, much more. And in all that time, Villa haven't won shit. For a club of Villa's size, with its back catalogue of achievements, it's been an agonising wait to achieve anything of note outside of a few runs in smaller European competitions like the UEFA Cup and this year's Europa Conference League.
(For fans of smaller sides who never play in Europe or don't even play in the top flight, I get it, this might sound spoiled! The same way I'd make pissbaby boo hoo faces at a Chelsea fan complaining it's been longer than 12 months since they last won a trophy. I hope you can realise I'm trying to talk about an imbalance in achievements vs the history and size of the club, and how my lifetime in particular has coincided with a relative dry spell!)
For that whole time, I've been in therapy. Not actual therapy, but sports video game therapy. As maligned as they can be, sports video games are very good at allowing fans of the bottlers, choke artists, downtrodden and plain bad teams the chance to dream. If we can't win anything in real life, at least we can win something in FIFA, or Pro Evo, or Madden, games that allow players to simulate alternate timelines where their terrible team can sign a superstar, catch some lucky breaks, beat their rivals and achieve glory. It's not actual glory, but for a brief shining moment, it's something.
From the early FIFA games through to PES and now back to EA Sports FC, I've been taking charge of Villa and, through career mode playthroughs, transformed the club from inconsistent irrelevance to global powerhouse. I've lost track of the number of stars who have graced my (virtual) Villa Park who would never have signed for the club in real life: Alan Shearer, Dennis Bergkamp, Thierry Henry, Zidane, Pirlo, Aguero, Benzema, Messi, Odegaard and countless others. We've won cups, league titles, banished rivals to the shadow realm, and reigned supreme over English football for years or sometimes (thank you, PES Master League) decades at a time.
The crowning achievement every season, though, is playing in the Champions League, the chance for the biggest teams around Europe to face off and see who is the best of the best. Playing Brentford a couple of times a season is fine, I guess, but it's way sexier to have midweek nights away at Real Madrid or Milan. Yet every time my (virtual) Villa would embark on a Champions League campaign, it would be pure fantasy, digital wish fulfilment, because since the competition's inception in 1992 Villa have never qualified for the real thing. Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City, Spurs, Newcastle, Blackburn, Leeds and even Leicester have all had a shot, but never Villa.
Until now! This week Villa, resurgent under the management of Unai Emery, secured fourth spot in the Premier League and a guaranteed place in next season's Champions League. I know it's not technically winning something, but given the magnitude of the achievement, it feels like it. For the first time ever, I'm going to sit down with a football video game next season and it won't be pure fantasy. Aston Villa will be there in the Champions League, with a seat at the big boy's table, for real. And it's a very weird feeling.
I'm joyous as a fan, of course. Having been playing in England's second division as recently as 2018 (while on the brink of financial ruin), the thought of squaring off against PSG and Barcelona in the Champions League just six years later is wild. But there's an extra layer of gratification here from my years in the digital desert. I feel like every season of faking it has made the year we actually made it all the more satisfying. All that compounded hurt, those decades spent playing pretend, and now the dream has actually come true.
It's a nice feeling! And we don't get many of those these days, so I'm going to cherish every second of it.
