10 Years of FIFA 13
The Best FIFA and the one that made me fall in love with the sport of football
Somehow, I remember the very first goal I scored in a FIFA game. It was with Anderson while playing the FIFA 13 Player Career Mode with Manchester United. I was then unfortunately sent on loan to Norwich City the next game.
Since then, I’ve gone on to play every single FIFA (and even went back and played 12) and managed to attain feats like winning the Champions League with Everton, scoring exactly 100 goals with Paulo Dybala in one season, signing Cristiano and Messi to Arsenal and making them retire at the Emirates as well as broken so many controllers over a last-minute equalizer in FUT Champs. Yet there’s something about the first FIFA game that I played that always brings back fond memories.
First Touch
I had managed to get hold of a pirated FIFA 13 copy being sold for 100 Rupees (around $1 now) at a local market and decided to get it. Raised in India, a cricket-centric country, I rarely ever had time to invest myself in other sports. That is if I could take time off watching Sachin Tendulkar score 100s of 100s while the Indian national cricket team won every trophy available under the captaincy of MS Dhoni. Football was high culture, only the “elites” or the “wannabes” watched football here. My only brush up with football until then was when I watched the 2010 World Cup with my dad on TV and I remember two things about it — a) laying my eyes on my first favorite footballer, Kaka and then seeing him get sent off and b) falling in love with the Tiki-Taka employed by the victorious Spanish side.
Booting up FIFA 13 for the first time on my low-end PC and being greeted with Messi on the title screen was all I needed to pick my side in the eternal rivalry between Messi and Ronaldo (though later on, I fell in love with Messi genuinely). I didn’t know any teams apart from Manchester United and Barcelona and a 12-year-old me thought starting my career at Barcelona would turn my game into Spanish which is why I chose to play for Manchester United.
The only sports game I had played before FIFA 13 was Cricket 07, also made by EA Sports. I had no idea what was career mode, and what the features like “My Pro” and “Transfer Market” were. I didn’t even know any rules about football, let alone the offside rule. I was a rookie entering the world of football, without knowing how important this sport would go on to become in my life, eventually landing me as a graduate student in Real Madrid’s Academy.
Shirt Untucked
13 had flair. 13 was not just vibes and inshallah. Every pass was stressful, goalkeepers were top-notch, finesse meta didn’t work and the AI was quite good for its time. Getting bullied off the ball if you took just a few more touches than necessary was a common occurrence. The collisions with players, balls that fizzed across the pitch on rainy matchdays and bringing down over-the-top balls with first touches were all unparalleled compared to previous games. The career mode menu, though sometimes not navigation-friendly, was always littered with interesting news tidbits about the world of football. I used to read the in-game news articles about how Benzema is close to joining Chelsea, the squad announced for the Indian Team’s friendlies, Suarez handing in a transfer request and more while the announcers kept talking about the scorelines of the matchday at the same time. The Transfer Negotiations system was very light as compared to the cutscenes and extra elements of modern games, and the animation of putting the pen on paper was the cherry on top.
Some things were quite annoying though — like limited player customization, useless substitution animations, the fact that you had to hold down another button (LT/LB) to perform skill moves and more. Though looking back at them now, they weren’t all that bad. The current career mode climate, with all its innovations and new features, still feels stripped down and a ghost of how intricate and personal career mode used to feel.
Since mine was a pirated copy, I never got to explore the Online components of FIFA 13. But looking at videos of YouTubers playing FIFA 13 online always brings a smile to my face. The rage, the delight at packing special cards in Ultimate Team, and the banter during Pro Clubs all make me feel so left out that I never got into all of that back then. My online experience with FIFA only started around FIFA 19, and by then the community had gone rotten. Now, it’s unbearable.
The Sound of Football
For me, any form of media is permanently cemented in my head if it has great music. I never forget a movie or a series or a game that has a soundtrack that makes me wanna Shazam every single time a song comes up. I know EA has always had a good track record with music for their games, having come across that when I played games like Cricket 07 and Need for Speed Underground 2.
Up until FIFA 13, my music listening habits mostly revolved around Yo Yo Honey Singh and Justin Bieber (both great artists) and if I hadn’t been introduced to FIFA music back then, I probably wouldn’t have had the 12 followers on my Spotify profile today.
One of the first songs that made me feel something as I was browsing the menus was The Weight of Living Pt. II by Bastille. I remember stopping so many times just to listen to that song before I started my next match. I even recorded the song through my computer’s speakers using my phone’s recorder because I didn’t know how to buy or download songs at that age. I remember enjoying the pre-match presentation segments as Club Foot by Kasabian played while my odd-looking 17-year-old player with silver hair and sideburns walked onto the pitch at Old Trafford. Coming back to the main menu after a frustrating FA Cup fixture and hearing Lil Wayne rap on Let It Roll Pt. 2 calmed me down for a while before I would pick myself up and prepared for the next game. There are just so many memorable songs that unlock core memories of that winter for me like Champion by The Chevin, Saturday by The Enemy and of course GOLDRUSHED by The Royal Concept. Then FIFA 14 came along and had even better music like the iconic Love Me Again, Dreaming, On Our Way etc. There have just been so many great FIFA songs over the years that it feels like it warrants a whole article of its own. Maybe I’ll do that next.
FIFA 13 was certainly a core part of my childhood. I went back and replayed that game so many times just for the vibes even when I had the latest one installed. 13 certainly takes me places where no other FIFA game has been able to take me yet. Maybe it’s the nostalgia, or a psychological bias cause it was my first FIFA, or maybe, just maybe it was something so special that I could never explain in my lifetime.
