Liverpool FC Being Boss in Real life is Ruining FIFA 21 for Me, a Liverpool Fan

How my favourite team’s real-life success is killing my enjoyment of virtual football

I assume most who read the heading would assume me an Everton, Manchester United or City fan before hitting those last three words. To that, firstly, I say how very dare you. Secondly, I’m sure Liverpool’s success right now is way more annoying to fans of those clubs, what with us being ‘the unbearables’ and all. But even as a Liverpool fan, I’m fast becoming sick to the back teeth of seeing my beloved team in FIFA 21.

To understand my plight is to also understand the rollercoaster it’s been to be a Liverpool fan over the last 30 years. As the most decorated English football club, Liverpool FC are world famous thanks to their staggering domestic and European success, particularly in 1970s and ‘80s. Since winning the English league title back in the 89/90 season, however, our record has been far… spottier.

To be fair, while a lot of Liverpool fans would describe the last 30 years as a ‘dark period’, it’s not been without highlight. In fact, I think most other football clubs would kill to have dark periods even half as successful as ours. I mean, there’s the famous Champions League victory in 2005 for example, where we came from 3–0 down to win the trophy on penalties against a vastly superior AC Milan side. We’ve won FA and League cups in that time too, been to plenty of finals and flirted with winning the league a few times — a mere Steven Gerrard-slip away from one title as rival fans loved to remind us, before we emphatically exorcised those demons last season.

So, while we’ve had things to sing about sprinkled across our most unsuccessful periods, we lacked one thing: consistency. For a myriad of reasons — be it not getting our first-choice signings, management mistakes, or owners not wanting to splash the cash — whenever we won major honours, we were never able to keep doing it. And often, with those wins, we were the underdog — we won things in spite of everyone, even ourselves, and that actually suited us for a while.

Since Jurgen Klopp took the reins at Liverpool, however, we’ve steadily improved our squad and performances each year and, since adding our sixth European Cup in the 18/19 season and following it up by positively waltzing the Premier League last year (the prize we coveted most but eluded us much of my adult life), things finally feel different.

Simply put, there’s never been a better time to be a Liverpool fan in my lifetime. Unless you’re one that plays FIFA 21 online.

As someone with zero affinity for the card-collecting, microtransaction-laden management angle of Ultimate Team, I always look to FIFA’s ‘Seasons’ mode as my go-to for playing online. Seasons is FIFA’s modern take on Ranked play, but dressed in the form of faux, hyper-condensed football league seasons.

This means that while you’re still only playing ranked matches against randoms, you need to win enough matches to avoid dropping to lower divisions or win promotion to higher ones. There’s no actual league, no table, no set number of opponents to play home and away, but it is enough to give matches the impression they matter, echoed by the in-game presentation where the commentators impart the importance of the game and even consider your form. Even though there really aren’t, it feels like there are stakes and repercussions beyond the immediate match. Superficial as it all is, I kinda love it for that.

And in Seasons mode I always play as Liverpool. My problem, however, is that given our recent success and the state of our team, we’re more highly rated in video games than we’ve ever been. And that means everyone else is picking Liverpool too. I’m not being dramatic when I say that most of my nights on FIFA 21 have been spent locked exclusively in mirror matches against the team I love and exclusively play as, and it’s becoming a real problem.

Anfield, Liverpool’s home ground — a stadium I hold sacred and one of the few physical spaces I miss existing in since emigrating to Australia — now causes me to physically recoil when an online match loads in FIFA 21, especially when inevitably in tandem with the bright turquoise of Liverpool’s away kit worn by my opponent.

I watch the pre-match formalities as two teams with the same players walk out onto the pitch, causing me to momentarily wonder if I’m seeing double (four Krusties!). Later in the build-up, as the players await the whistle for kick-off, two Jurgen Klopps walk their technical areas, perfectly synchronised in their animated attempts at replicating our manager’s real-life exuberance.

In the matches themselves, where we often cancel each other out, the commentators talk about how Liverpool players have sloppily given the ball away to other Liverpool players, how Liverpool are playing well but are also not, and how Mo Salah is having a great game but also the worst for whoever’s on the losing end at the time. In matches where I’m assigned as the ‘away’ Liverpool side, if I wheel a goalscoring player towards Anfield’s famous Kop stand, they’ll find themselves confronted by a strangely despondent wall of Liverpool fans, all visibly disappointed that Liverpool have scored. FIFA’s presentation used to be the cherry on the cake, but in this unending existential and dissonant nightmare it’s a cherry that exists purely to ruin any sense of immersion.

These things would be fine in relative isolation — once or twice a week in a battle of two Liverpool fans — but it’s tedious when it’s literally most matches. What’s worse is this weird turn of events has me desperate to see Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge or Manchester United’s Old Trafford, among others. These stadiums host teams I either love to hate or outright detest, places I’d usually leave objectivity at the door, and now I find myself positively pining for them.

Look, this is absolutely a first-world problem and I’m fortunate that my team are challenging for the highest accolades once more. I also realise I can’t lay claim to being the sole proprietor of my favourite football team online and that people are free to play as whoever they like. It’s just so weird that at a time when FIFA should be most fun for someone like me, I realise I simply enjoyed it more when Liverpool were worse.

FIFA Seasons used to mean thrilling nights of touring Europe’s finest, overcoming the odds with underdog grit, not to mention exciting curveballs in between. Now it means only a dread of repetition — a strange reality where I constantly hope not to face one of the few things I love the most.