UK Edition
Pele of the console - David Meyler says Fifa will always be part of his life regardless of the path he chooses post playing career
When it comes to playing Fifa 19, the Irish international midfielder David Meyler, who is currently on loan at League One Coventry City, has a singular advantage over the rest of us: he can choose to play as himself.
“If I’m playing a buddy who’s not as good as me, he’ll go Real Madrid and I’ll go Coventry,” he says. “And it’s really odd when I do, because I always refer to myself in the third person. I start complaining about myself, moaning about how useless I am.” He pauses for a moment and laughs. “Now I know how my manager feels.”
But never mind his own digital shortcomings, even when he plays as himself, when it comes to Fifa, Meyler usually wins. On the grass he may have risen no further than to wear a Hull City shirt (in which he was once butted by the then Newcastle United manager Alan Pardew), but on the screen he is almost unbeatable. This is the Pele (though probably not the Pardew) of the console.
“I started playing Fifa 98 when I was 11,” he says of the game. “I’d be playing my buddies back home all the time, best of three, I loved that. I carried on playing it when I became a pro and came to England. Then about Fifa 16/17 I took a decision: I’m going to get to the point where no one can beat me.”
After spending hours perfecting his technique, he is closing in on such a destination. Indeed there are many who have been beaten easily by him who are making a significant prediction about Meyler: so good is he that, when eventually he hangs up his boots, he could become the first professional footballer to embark on a second career as a professional e-gamer.
“Listen, if you sit down 100 footballers and ask them what they want do when they retire, the answer you’d get back is that 90 don’t know,” he says. “I couldn’t commit to saying this is what I want to do. I’ve started my coaching badges, so I might go that route. When the moment comes, we’ll see where we’re at. But I tell you what, even if I don’t play it professionally, Fifa is always going to be a big part of my life.”
For an idea of quite how big a part it plays, it is worth heading to YouTube. Meyler has his own channel, on which he dispenses tips on how to improve your Fifa game. As an indication of his growing e-gaming reputation, his channel has more than 350,000 subscribers.
Which is perhaps no surprise. The truth is, Fifa is now a very big deal. This weekend, for instance, in a specially constructed e-gaming arena in west London, the first official e-Premier League competition is taking place.
Across the country, thousands of e-gamers have been battling to represent the team they support in the competition. Numbers have finally been whittled down to 40, two players representing each of the Premier League’s 20 clubs, one playing Fifa on Xbox, the other on PlayStation. The winner, wearing their team’s shirt with their name printed across the shoulders, will emerge some time this afternoon.
Meyler is disappointed not to be among them. He was otherwise engaged this weekend, playing for Coventry at Barnsley. But he will be watching the progress of the tournament (the final is being broadcast live on Sky) enjoying yet further evidence of the game’s phenomenal reach. Not least among his fellow professionals.
“There’s a thing called a pro player card that EA Sports awards to professionals who play Fifa, provided they get up to a certain level. They give away 100 each edition and if you’ve got one, it’s big kudos in the dressing room. They’ve given away all the cards for Fifa 19 and last I heard there were 625 pro players across Europe who were in the queue trying to get their card when the cut-off point came.”
Meyler recalls playing with Hull’s Tom Huddlestone just before the two of them were called down to the bus to take them to the FA Cup final in 2014 (Andre Pirlo remembers doing the same ahead of winning the World Cup in 2006). On international duty, he found an almost as equally adept opponent in Cardiff’s Harry Arter. And he says that while he is always keen on a game of Call of Duty or Fortnite, nothing matches the all-round challenge of Fifa. He reckons the game is the perfect way of filling up a professional’s down time without threatening their physical preparation.
“You can 100 per cent play alongside being a pro,” he says. “It’s really useful preparation. You could check on the strengths and weaknesses of players you are going up against, things like which foot they favour. It’s brilliant research.” Though he adds that, as David James found when he admitted to making mistakes in matches after spending too much time on his console, restraint is necessary. “You need to find balance. I set myself limits, make sure I do things like staying hydrated and don’t miss out on sleep. Plus, it’s important to make family time. Since my wife told me I was spending more time with my console than my daughter, I’ve made sure I only play when she’s not around.”
But even as he hones his technique, even as he improves through online challenges from players around the world, there is one aspect of the game that disappoints him: there is nothing about his screen avatar that makes him stand out. Not like Wycombe’s Adebayo Akinfenwa, for instance, who became an international cult figure when the encyclopedic data embedded in the game revealed him to be the physically strongest footballer in the world. Or Meyler’s Ireland and former Sunderland colleague Aiden McGeady has given his name to a high-level Fifa move called “The McGeady Spin”.
“I actually played in that game when he performed that skill, now I can do it on screen,” Meyler says. “Every football ground he goes to, he gets mobbed by kids telling him they can do the McGeady spin and asking for selfies. And you know what really cheeses me off about that? He’s getting all that fame and he doesn’t even play Fifa.”