Top 10 Soccer Video Games of All Time

What do soccer fans do when they're not watching the beautiful game?

If the popularity of soccer video games is any clue, they're playing more of the beautiful game on their XBox, Wii or PlayStation 3.

But while soccer video games are popular today, the genre also has a long, distinguished history dating back to the original NES and even earlier.

We're not video game experts, but we've done our best to compile a list of the 10 best soccer video games. Since we're not experts, we didn't rank them.

And since we're not experts, we know we probably left something out. Let us know in the comments.

1994's Sensible World of Soccer proved that gameplay matters. That's why it remains a classic today. A simple control scheme combined with a bird's-eye view of the field allows players endless hours of replay value.

By today's standards the graphics aren't impressive. But the features—which include career mode, transfers, players with unique traits and more than a thousand real-world teams—still hold up nearly 20 years later. And besides, the top-view graphics actally looked pretty good.

SWOS was so influential in the soccer genre that it was included in a Stanford University list of most important video games.

Management sims are huge today, but their beginnings were hardly so auspicious. As PC World Magazine notes:

Back in the late '80s and early '90s, soccer management sims were a dime a dozen. You couldn’t get away from the bloody things, with multiple titles hitting store shelves on a bimonthly basis. (This was mainly due to a thriving UK games industry, which naturally had a predilection for all things football.) Unfortunately, most of these games were boring as bat poop, and twice as dry to boot.

Then along came On the Ball: World Cup Edition in 1994. Suddenly, gamers got the real managerial experience:

Marriage break-ups, love affairs, beating up unscrupulous journalists — the managerial problems the game threw at you were wonderfully authentic.

It also let you make rousing or scathing speeches at halftime, which is surely the best part of the job.

Sounds like fun to us.

As the slogan says, "Intellivision Soccer is so realistic, you'll feel as if you're playing on the field."

Uhm, yeah. Something like that.

This is the progenitor, the original of the species. Special recognition is warranted, no matter how dated the graphics look these days.

Ten years after Intellivision Soccer, this is how far the genre had progressed:

Playing soccer with Double Dragon characters.

As silly as that sounds, this game was actually pretty good. True to the Double Dragon theme, players could beat each other up on the field without penalty. And playing surfaces varied from grass to dirt to ice.

Each team had a specialty finishing move, except the USA, who in typical American-exceptionalist style could do every move (each player could perform a different one).

Thus Team USA won the only World Cup in its history.

Everyone loves Mario, and everyone loves soccer. Why not combine the two?

Nintendo did it successfully twice, first with 2005's Super Mario Strikers and then with its 2007 sequel Mario Strikers Charged. Both games received rave reviews, but the sequel is generally considered slightly better.

While other games on this list go for realism, that's not important to this franchise. Think Super Smash Bros. with a ball.

This is the franchise that causes people to lose sleep. The 2010 version is one of the best in the series.

IGN UK, which rated the game 9.3 out of 10, wrote in its review: "It’s the stat-heavy beast beloved by millions of PC Gamers, but prettier, more accessible and with some ingenious new tweaks."

Football Manager 2010 allows players to choose from 51 nations and 115 international leagues. But like IGN suggested, the best features might be the graphics and new 3D matches.

FIFA 10 and FIFA 11 both received excellent reviews. We'll take the word of IGN UK, which rated FIFA 11 slightly higher.

In the review, IGN UK rated FIFA 11 9.5 out of 10, calling the game the latest refinement in the soccer genre:

It’s excellence, not innovation, that wins out, and that’s surely no bad thing; for the next twelve months at least this is likely to be the best football experience available, and FIFA’s looking like retaining its crown in convincing fashion.

The name is a mouthful, but the game is a classic.

Gamers could choose from up to 54 teams with 18 players each in six different modes. Despite not having a FIFA license, the game somehow managed to feature Fabrizio Ravanelli, Andreas Koepke, Paul Ince and Carlos Valderrama on its various covers.

Most soccer games around the time of Kick Off 2 didn't require much skill or strategy. Kick Off 2 changed that.

Suddenly dribbling and passing were took sill, and players actually had to think about basic in-game strategy.

Another new feature was the game's 24 unique referees, each of whom called the game differently.

Different versions of 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa received different ratings. The Wii version was rated most highly by critics.

GameSpot praised the game's "(i)mpressive visuals and animation" and "(s)ignificantly better commentary than FIFA 10." IGN wrote: "There’s no question that 2010 FIFA World Cup is a very impressive game of soccer at its core."