Much to my chagrin, I am a nonner. The transition of my self-perception from "athlete" to "common folk" was hastened by a failed three-year stint with a local club soccer team in middle school. Since then, I've always harbored the acrimonious feeling that my athletic career came to an untimely end not due to my lack of elite skills, but because of my teenage growth spurt's tardy arrival.
Revisionist history aside, I had difficulty watching soccer without flashing back to the most potent of my recurring traumas: I was the striker, a scrawny figure, less than five feet in stature, attempting to outrun and out-muscle a physically empowered, full-grown sweeper. I didn't tally a single goal during my final year with the team, though I did learn that I have a propensity to bruise when repeatedly thrown to the ground.
As my relationship with soccer fractured, I indulged in the vast number of other sports at the disposal of the American spud. That is, until one fateful night during my sophomore fall here in Hanover.
I had just moved into a devastatingly small one-room double in the Topliff basement with football player and video game extraordinaire Corey Vann '13, proprietor of the wonderful "Vann Island" column that graces these pages every Tuesday. Corey and I had been best friends in elementary school, attended different high schools, then serendipitously ended up at Dartmouth. While compatible individuals generally stay compatible, I would be lying if I said I wasn't slightly worried about how this new living situation would operate in practice. This anxiety vanished when Corey plugged in his Xbox and asked me to join him in a casual game of FIFA 2011.
Any reservations I held about returning to the game of soccer were involuntarily discarded during that first game. The video game mirrored the competitive intensity of a live game in a manner that no other virtual experience could match, and I was hooked. The FIFA experience was so intoxicating that I became powerless to the lure of the star-studded European football leagues. After consciously avoiding the sport for all those years, I was well on my way to becoming a soccer junkie.
I had always imagined my story to be unique, as we are all wont to do, but the more FIFA I played, the more I realized my story was a standard one among college students. Last Tuesday, the date of FIFA 2013's release, Roger Bennett of ESPN SoccerNet and co-host of the "Men in Blazers" podcast described the FIFA sensation as a "quiet national revolution." Bennett went on to cite an ESPN Sports poll conducted by social scientist Rich Luker, which found that soccer has become the second most popular sport among Americans between 18 and 24 years of age, trailing only the NFL.
Luker was most astonished not by soccer's advancing popularity, but by the cause of this growing fan base.
"For the longest time, I believed video games and fandom of sport were not connected," Luker said. "But games like FIFA have done more to advance the popularity of soccer than I have seen with any other sport."
General manager of EA Sports football franchises Matt Bilbey agreed with this diagnosis, saying that "while there can be no substitute to seeing Barcelona at the Nou Camp, the American audience enjoys interacting with our game more than watching soccer passively on television."
In hopes of confirming or denying this hypothesis, I sat down at a table in First Floor Berry with plans to chat up the first student I saw wearing soccer paraphernalia. After spotting Camden Nogay '13 wearing a Barca jersey, I strolled over to him and asked if he would mind telling me his feelings about the FIFA video game franchise. He enthusiastically agreed. Cam disclosed that before he started following European club soccer, he had indeed been a diehard FIFA player. "Now," Cam told me, "I'm at the point where I split my Saturdays between the English Premier League in the mornings and college football in the afternoon."
Though my statistical methods would cause most Dartmouth professors to jump out of their ivory towers, Cam's attitude toward FIFA was revealing. "One of my favorite things is to watch a Saturday EPL match, see Arsenal playing with a 4-3-3, and be like, Oh, I should try playing them with a 4-3-3,'" Cam said.
It is this interaction between witnessing real world strategy and the virtual experience of implementing those tactics that seems to give the game not only an edge over other franchises, but also the keys for opening up America to the world's most popular sport.
