Pro Evolution Soccer 2012

I hate Sky Sports. FIFA is a criminal organisation. Sepp Blatter is despicable. Oil-rich Sheiks and stat obsessed Americans who have never got muddy on a frosty pitch in November are buying clubs left and right. Gormless idiots move their mouths and make sounds to the backdrop of whooshing graphics and offensively edited clip montages. Mister Nigel Moviefone—Mr Randy Moviefone’s British cousin—growls vacuous pronouncements in adverts for Super Sunday, Soccer Saturday, Moronic Monday. Players and coaches alike act like a justification for the extinction of the human race. And the Dons lie second to bottom place in a league that’s more Hanna-Barbera than Mickey Mouse.

It’s no wonder that many of my computer gamey friends despise football. I don’t blame them. The sport has never been so characterless, so ugly, so hollow. Each iteration of FIFA tops the charts. Walk in any town centre and you’ll see people wearing £50 shirts in support of teams from places they’ve likely never been, emblazoned with the names of players who are so rich they might as well be living on the moon. I used to make fun of my father for reflexively kicking while watching games, his slippers threatening to fly off his feet, but now I have the same visceral excitement during goalmouth scrambles and midfield clashes. I still jump up and yell when a last minute winner bobbles in, or gape like a fish with lockjaw at a Xavi Hernandez pass.Football’s like a friend who acts differently when it’s trying to impress other people. You know the type: someone who’ll act like an idiot to fit in, but who is actually articulate and fun when cornered.

There’s a glimpse of that other side when I play Pro Evolution Soccer 2012. When I’m embroiled in the Master League I can forget the unpleasantness of the real sport. The disconnect from reality and lack of authenticity is a balm to my sensibilities. Sure, Konami try and buy licenses and replicate some of the monster truck style pageantry of its rival, but who are they kidding? They’re like a nerdy kid with glasses and brown cords buying a G-Star Raw jacket to look cool. Their licensing efforts are always comprehensively outdone by the rabid modding community and the bad commentary is funny for a game or two before it gets muted, likewise the ill-chosen music. This year I didn’t play even play two matches before I’d installed the latest mod package from PES-Patch, released mere days after the game itself and already comprehensive in its representation of kits, players, and stadiums. In a way, Pro Evolution Soccer gives gamers freedom to choose their experience based on what patch they download and it’s rare to see a PC player running a vanilla version. If they can’t find one to fit, it’s easy and fun to tweak every aspect of teams and players in the editor, which is one of the most detailed around, putting offerings from dedicated RPGs like Skyrim and Dragon Age to shame.

I find it easy to relate Pro Evolution to RPGs. Players share the same sort of hero’s journey: even if there isn’t a prescribed narrative to a football career, there’s still a sense of progression, identity, and eventual victory. So “Football Life”, the name Konami have given to their suite of RPG-like modes this year, is apt. These include Be a Legend, which has you controlling one player throughout his career; Master League, in which you guide as a hands on manager; and the new Club Boss mode, which casts you as Director of Football, making broader policy decisions regarding the operation of your club. If anything, the blank nature of the narrative and principle characters—players and managers—adds to the allure. It offers room for my imagination to stretch. I can ascribe all sorts of meaning to the results of matches and the shape of the league. I have players I irrationally like or despise, bogey teams and allies. I follow real football well enough to know something about most teams, yet that knowledge only transfers to the Master League in a vague sense, leaving it largely untainted by reality.

I’m currently playing as St. Pauli—a team from Reeperbahn,   a Hamburg red light district—in the Spanish Primera Liga. They’re normally in the German second division. Renowned for their skull and crossbones logo, anarchic support, and financial instability, they’ve become my pet team. I feel better playing as a team like St. Pauli because I can pretend that their players aren’t irredeemable arseholes. The only one I recognise is Moritz Volz of Fulham fame, and he always seemed like a genuinely decent guy. Well, unless I discount the appearance of Filippo “Super Pippo” Inzaghi in my youth team following his in-game retirement the previous season. It’s easy to pretend that he’s actually Inzaghi’s forgotten son, conceived during a night of passion in the Reeperbahn in the nineties. The blood tells and soon the sixteen year old (who looks the same as his dad did when he retired) is slotting exquisite finishes and deft headers. The rest of the team, however, are completely unknown to me. Shutting Cristiano Ronaldo down and skinning Gerard Pique is made all the sweeter by doing it with a bunch of kids and obscure journeymen.

Of course, as I win more matches my finances and players will improve, the sponsors will circle like vultures, and I’ll no longer be the underdog. In real life, selling out would be inevitable, yet in Pro Evo I can pretend that my guys remain grounded and that the team invests in good causes. They’d give something back to the community, right? Call me a sentimentalist, but they certainly would in my game.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2012 offers me a refuge from the whirlwind of chromed bullshit that surrounds the sport in real life. It’s idiosyncratic, inauthentic, and consistently fun. That’s why I buy it every year and why I play a quick game almost every day. Each 15 minute match adds a little to the grand narrative of my club, and looking back over the results I see more than cold stats. I can forget how hard the sport sucks Satan’s evil dick, lapping up the seed of profits and shitting out a product more market-targeted than the Jonas Brothers. Bless your incompetence, Konami. Bless you, Pro Evo.