Culture

Inside the match that will change FIFA forever

For FIFA 22, EA Sports motion-captured a 90-minute contest between two Spanish sides. Its echoes will be felt by millions of gamers

Under the floodlights of Seville’s 60,000-seater La Cartuja stadium, two Andalusian sides take to the pitch for the latest chapter in their fierce local rivalry. It’s perhaps the biggest game of their lives – and it soon shows. Moments after kick-off, crunching slide tackles fly in and opposing players barge each other for the ball. One late challenge lights the touch paper and both teams square up to one another, arms outstretched, chests puffed up as they wave imaginary yellow cards at the referee. 

As the fouls tally up, so do the goals. Atlético Sanluqueño go 3-1 up. In the second half, CD Gerena, chasing the comeback, abandon their patient, possession-based play. Pacy wingers and powerful forwards are subbed on, long balls are cannoned into the box, wave after wave of attack is repelled by heroic leaps from Sanluqueño’s centre-backs. But there’s only so much that the backs-to-wall defending can absorb; Gerena pull a goal back. 

With minutes remaining, and desperation sapping already weary legs and minds, Sanluqueño launch a devastating breakaway – they win 4-2. As the players wheel away in celebration, the Gerena team slump down on their haunches. Some shake their heads, others look to the heavens. They know how much this match means – it will go down in history as one of the most influential 90 minutes of football ever played. Yet it won’t ever be found in the record books.

For rather than club colours, each side is sporting Xsens motion capture suits. On the touchline, crews are hunching over laptops. Short-range signalling devices, tracking players’ motion to the millimetre, sit in the stands alongside production staff studying tablets displaying live metrics. Thousands of miles away, an animation director is carefully watching proceedings unfold on Zoom. But this isn’t the work of a space age scouting team, nor the latest coaching innovation. 

These are the makers of FIFA 22. For the first time, EA motion-captured a live 90-minute football match, tracking players’ movements to a granular level which could then be added to its animation database. The gaming publisher looked for the big details down to the minutiae: from how a full-back strikes the ball with their laces, to how a playmaker instinctively glances over their shoulder before receiving a pass. “Ultimately, realism equals a better game,” says Gareth Eaves, senior animation director at EA who led the session remotely. “We wanted to do it for years but the technology just hadn’t been there.”

Typically, EA uses optical capture, actors and the odd superstar footballer, like Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi, to write new animations. But it involves a small space with one or two players at a time – making it hard to attack the ball at pace or ping passes from one wing to the other. Restricted passages of motion-captured play, like keepie-uppies or one-on-one dribbles, have to be adapted by FIFA animators into free-flowing movements which ape eleven-a-side matches.

But now, the cameras have been ditched. The motion capture stage has been abandoned. Only the Xsens suits remain. “One of the problems had been drift – we’d know where players’ joints were in relation to each other, but not relative to a point in space,” Eaves explains. In virtual terms, it meant players running around would return ten metres away from their starting spot. EA’s game changer has been a local positioning system. Rather than GPS satellites, LPS beacons were dotted around the stadium, with motion sensors strapped to players’ chests.

It meant high-quality data could finally be captured in a real football match. “We picked these two teams from Spain’s third tier because they have an historic rivalry,” Eaves says. “They’re both well-coached, professional sides with amazing technique. They play possession-based football with control and finesse – great for a video game because we want it to be fast and fun.”

EA’s direction was minimal beyond briefing the players and coaching staff that it was a “must-win match.” Not that the game needed an extra edge. “Just like in a real game, players were subbed on and off, we could capture tired defenders and fresh forwards as the game opened up," recalls Eaves. "You could feel the animosity. There were so many fouls in the first five minutes – it was exactly what we wanted.”

Those off-the-ball movements – shouting, pointing, posturing – were priceless for EA in capturing the physicality and intensity of a real-life game. “If a stuntman slide tackles someone in a motion capture space they pop back up, it doesn’t match the aggression of a real challenge,” explains Eaves. “In this game, the physicality is real. The player gets up and is angry, we take all of that intensity and put it in our game.”

It was only by capturing 22 players over 90 minutes that EA could generate enough animation, 8.75 million frames, to power its new ‘HyperMotion’ technology. Machine learning then kicks in. “Previously, when a player approaches the ball to perform the next action – a shot, pass or dribble – we’ve picked an animation from our database,” Eaves explains. “But it doesn’t know the context. All this data trains the network and helps blend animations.”

But how could the strive for realism impact a game which, ultimately, compresses 90 minutes of professional football into ten minutes or so of gameplay? “It’s a positive,” says FIFA YouTuber and streamer Chris Wood, aka Chesnoid Gaming. “The whole idea of sport video games is to replicate what you see in real life every weekend. So it brings the game to life even more. Rather than five-minute halves of a video game, it becomes closer to five-minute halves of a real football match.”

The aim is that the dashes, feints and micro-movements captured in southern Spain will help inform how some of the best players in the world move in FIFA 22. Take, for example, Mo Salah: the nuances as he traps the ball, the delicate touches as he accelerates, skips past lunging defenders, bears down on goal and slots it home. 

Their movements were immortalised that night. They'll soon be experienced by upwards of 30 million gamers worldwide. It’s why it mattered so much to both sides. “One of the goalkeepers faced a hard shot right at him and the ball slipped through his fingers,” remembers Eaves. “He was absolutely devastated – the emotion was real. I couldn’t help but think he probably didn’t want us to put that animation in the game.”

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK