The Great Debate: What is the best ever football video game? 🎮 | OneFootball

There isn’t much football on right now, so we’re having to indulge our addiction to the world’s most popular sport in other ways.

So it’s time to ask the Onefootball newsroom, what their favourite ever football video game is …

Lewis Ambrose

While I played my fair share of PES and FIFA growing up, it was Football Manager 2009 that really hooked me.

For some reason, I decided to take over Aston Villa and on that year’s version of the game it was able to sign Neymar on a free transfer after a year. So with Ashley Young and Gabby Agbonlahor becoming two of the world’s finest attacking threats, I added a teenage Neymar and Javi Martínez.

Lo and behold, Villa became the world’s greatest force, Neymar became a club legend, and I became a full-time FM devotee.

Dan Burke

The correct answer is probably PES 6 but for me personally, it’s FIFA: Road to World Cup 98.

If you watch the gameplay footage on YouTube now it looks dreadful but at the time, I remember feeling like I was controlling a televised football match.

It had David Beckham on the cover and Blur’s ‘Song 2’ as the soundtrack, but more importantly it had so much more depth than any football game that had gone before it.

With all 172 FIFA registered national teams included in the game, you could play through an entire qualification campaign for the 1998 World Cup, and there was also the hugely beloved indoor mode.

Hours of fun.

Matt Frohlich

Championship Manager 2001/02 has to be my answer. Sure, it lacked pretty much everything that the modern editions have, but it’s a throwback to a simpler time in football management simulation.

No agent fees, no social hierarchies to fall apart and the final version without a visual match engine. If anything, trying to read the in-game commentary flashing across the screen was the most amount of reading I ever did as a child!

As the first game I got really into, it holds many nostalgic memories like the hours my brother and I spent bonding over how to pronounce German names as manager of a very successful Bayern Munich side.

Alex Mott

Reader, he did it.

Joel Sanderson-Murray

I’m going to throw an earlier version of PES into the mix. Pro Evolution Soccer 4.

Fifa has undoubted perks but there was just something charming about this instalment of PES. At the time the gameplay felt closer to the real thing than Fifa did and there were a lot of laughs to be had with the unlicensed teams names.

Hours of fun were spent helping Brazilian Castolo drive Merseyside Red up the Master League.

Padraig Whelan

Forget your Fifa and PES games. This Is Football was where it was at!

It was its best in 2002 and 2003 and gets big bonus points over its rivals for the small touches littered throughout.

From playing jumpers for goalposts games to being able to dive (Neymar makes it look much easier than it was in the game) and launch nasty two-footed tackles that Roy Keane would be proud of, this was just so much fun.

The inclusion of classic teams and being able to customise your own club are what puts this over the top as the best of them all.