Every Football Video Game of the Last Decade Ranked by Sales, Critic Scores and User Reviews

The release of the latest edition in the EA Sports FIFA franchise is nearly upon us and sadly, it has been confirmed it will be the 30th and final version of the popular football video game, with a rebrand in progress. 

As of last year, the series has reportedly sold more than 325 million copies worldwide during its thirty-year run, with the figure set to increase significantly with the latest version due to be released on September 30th. As the iconic franchise launches its final game, sales are expected to soar for Premier League fans, and worldwide football fans alike.

Also set for release later this year is the 2023 version of another iconic football gaming franchise, Football Manager. The comprehensive sim game has come a long way since early incarceration in the 1990s, with many of the game's stats now being used in real-life football, with some clubs even citing it as a reason they signed players! 

Some OLBG members have played out games and used them the choose their football betting tips!

Sports Interactive, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

With all that in mind, here at OLBG, we decided to rank every version of the FIFA, Football Manager and PES franchises released in the last decade, along with the extremely popular Rocket League, to see which game came out on top. This was based on critic scores (from Opencritic and Metacritic), user ratings from Amazon and the number of copies sold during the year of the game's release.  

Here’s how the iconic franchises stacked up against each other…

FIFA Franchise Dominates the Top Ten

With a reported 31,000,000 sales worldwide and a 4.6 user rating (the joint highest on the list) from over 18,000 reviews, FIFA 21 ranked as the best Football video game released in the last ten years. The astronomical sales figures alone have made it the best-selling iteration of the extremely successful franchise by some 11 million. 

While that is extremely impressive, it's worth noting that at the time of the game's release back in September 2020, lockdowns were being imposed around the world, which definitely impacted how many people purchased it. 

FIFA 19 ranked second and had the second highest sales of any game on the list with approximately 20 million. It also beat the 21 version in terms of critic scores, scoring 82% on average. In fact, nine of the top ten places were occupied by FIFA franchise instalments, with the only outlier being the ever-popular Rocket League. 

Developed by Epic Games and Psyonix, the game has become free to play since 2020, but back when it was first released in 2015, it sold around 10,000,000 copies which is on par with several of the FIFA instalments.

The Best of the Rest

Konami, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Outside of the top ten, last year's FIFA 22 was the lowest ranked of the franchise placing eleventh. Pes 2013 and 2014 followed with that era being regarded as the best for the series as both had higher sales than any other edition of the Pro Evolution Soccer franchise. 

In stark contrast, the three latest versions of PES made up the bottom three, with 2021 propping up the table having the joint least sales and by far the lowest average critic score compared to all other games on the list. 

Football Manager’s latest releases fared much better than PES in every department with FM22, 19 and 21 coming fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth respectively. They also boast high critic scores for all of their games, with all editions (apart from FM15) gaining a rating of over 80%. Last year's instalment also had the highest user score (4.7) of any game the research looked at. 

Steam charts also indicate that the popularity of the game is increasing with peak players last month of nearly 76,000 which is impressive considering it was released nearly a year ago.

With this in mind, however, fans will have to wait until November before FM23 is released, meaning the playing figures for 22 may continue to grow.

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