FIFA Soccer 2002

FIFA Football 2002 (also known as FIFA Soccer 2002: Major League Soccer in North America and FIFA 2002: Road to the FIFA World Cup in Japan) is a football video game released in 2001 by Electronic Arts and published by EA Sports. FIFA 2002 is the ninth installment in the FIFA video game series. Power bars for passes were introduced to achieve a higher challenge level, and dribbling was reduced. The power bar can also be customized to the gamer’s liking. Although there was no Dutch league, the game included club emblems for many more European clubs and significant Dutch clubs such as PSV, AFC Ajax, and Feyenoord (they were under the “Rest of World” header). This game also includes the Swiss Super League for the first time, at the expense of the Greek League. A card reward system licensed from Panini was also introduced, in which a star player card is unlocked after winning a specific competition. There is also a bonus game with the nations that automatically qualified for the 2002 World Cup (France, Japan, and South Korea). The player attempts to improve their chosen team’s FIFA ranking by participating in international friendlies. Many of the international teams in the game are unlicensed (down to the player names, as in the Netherlands), as are smaller countries like Barbados, which were only given numbers as player names. Furthermore, this was the final FIFA edition (excluding World Cup editions) to feature the Japanese national team, as the Japan Football Association would later grant exclusive rights to Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer series. Before Lionel Messi appeared alone on FIFA 13, FIFA Football 2002 was the last FIFA to have only one person as the cover star for ten years.