Whatever Happens This World Cup, It Won’t Be As Fun as Playing FIFA: Road to World Cup 98

Have you ever had your head checked by a jumbo jet? Not easy, is it? But then, nothing is. Least of all getting Blur’s "Song 2" out of your head at any point in the rest of your life after playing FIFA: Road To World Cup 98, the best official tournament tie-in title there’s ever been.

Play it now and you will spot some clues that 28 years have passed since EA Canada wrote its magical code. There is not one single pack for you to open, for example. It does not feature accurate World Cup 2026 squads, kits, or stadiums. It does not even know about the year 2026. 2026 is science fiction to FIFA: Road To World Cup 98.

It knows only a moment, crystallised in time onto a game disc, in which Britpop and big beats provide the soundtrack for an era of optimism, working class heroism, Cool Brittania, New Labour, and teenagers fussing their hair into a rough approximation of David Beckham’s middle parting. He’s on the cover, by the way, looking blissfully unaware that the upcoming ‘98 World Cup would in fact be a heartbreaking disaster for him.

Old games are such effective time capsules, because their interactivity lets you immerse deeper into the moment they record. That seems to work double for sports games since they’re also endowed with rosters of players that fans of a certain age will get together and simply name, for hours and hours and hours on end – “Chilavert! Asprilla! Colin Calderwood!” – until sunrise or closing time. Collectors pay $500+ for old football (or soccer, as it's known in America, the primary home of this year's World Cup) shirts because they hold a piece of a dearly missed past within their fibers, and this game has 172 of them.

Not in officially licensed, correct-font-on-the-back, pantone-specific color form, you understand. In 1997, it was sufficiently amazing that those 172 national teams were in the game at all, let alone that their kits were all broadly the right color. Some, like Chile (Zamorano! Salas!) even have a recognizable kit template, in their case a massive Reebok logo across one shoulder. In fairness, this was 1997. If the developer had painstakingly recreated every badge, logo and material texture we’d barely have noticed them on a 480p CRT TV.

But what it did offer – what it continues to offer – is on-pitch gameplay with magnetic simplicity, married to a bunch of modes with real scope and ambition. This was a huge step up in gameplay terms, not just for the FIFA franchise but for 3D football titles.

Its analog movement gives you much more freedom on the pitch than prior FIFAs, which relied heavily on their official licenses to persuade you to play them. Mazier dribbles and more exploratory runs are possible now, and all at a speed that’s comparable to ISS’s adrenalised gallop. Throw in an all-new skill move system and a worryingly enjoyable professional foul button, and FIFA Road To World Cup 98 gives you more than enough means to express yourself on the pitch.

That’s what’s really striking about playing it today. Despite the clunky control layout (I played this on a PC keyboard! Imagine) there’s an intuition about it that just drives you towards goal, towards the next match, towards a hare-brained scheme to get Tahiti to the World Cup final.

You can quite literally kick an opposing player up and down the pitch to a degree that’d make even Pepe wince. It’s amazing what you don’t miss about modern-day EA Sports FC, its distant forebear. Obviously every single component part is more advanced in FC. Slicker. TV-like. But not having to worry about the meta, not being interrupted by unlocks and live events and pack openings, not being reminded constantly that this is one massive Skinner box of endless grind, it’s rather refreshing. It’s just you, a football, and a PC keyboard control layout that poses only a minor risk of RSI.

This being a game titled ‘Road To World Cup 98’, you might reasonably expect that World Cup 98’s qualifying stages would somehow be represented here, and you’d be quite right. It’s an epic journey to reach the tournament finals, as the 2026 Curacao squad will tell you, and this game captures it perfectly. Two qualifying rounds, against increasingly tricky opponents bolstered by a recent AI overhaul EA Canada had devised, and then France ‘98 itself. The AI logic here is still eminently beatable, but it does provide some variance between high quality squads and plucky underdogs.

Confusingly, EA also released a game simply called ‘World Cup 98’ several months after RTWC98, to coincide (*cough* cash in *cough*) on the tournament taking place. But in truth this release was far more limited than its predecessor. While the latter brought some minor graphical tweaks and an admittedly cool ‘World Cup Classics’ mode which recreates vintage matches from days gone by, complete with massive ‘80s perms, era-specific commentators and sepia tone 1930s broadcasts, it didn’t feature the qualifying rounds, nor the league sides that RTWC98 did, making it an extravagant purchase for anyone who already owned the previous game.

This game is generous by contrast, supplementing the massive World Cup qualifying mode with the usual league football you’d expect from a FIFA title. Quite understandably, though, RTWC98 is not remembered for its Premier League action. It’d take a pretty dyed-in-the-wool Aston Villa supporter to resist the inbuilt World Cup fever and simply play match after match of domestic football. Particularly when the game also features a legendary and chaotic mode that would feature just once in the series: indoor mode.

Set in what looks like a school gym out of hours, indoor mode changes the very nature of the game by letting you bounce your passes and shots off the walls in five-a-side matches. It gets you thinking about your movement and controls in a different way, proving a great testing ground for skill move practice. Best of all, there are no fouls in this mode. Remember that professional foul button I mentioned earlier? Yeah. You can quite literally kick an opposing player up and down the pitch here to a degree that’d make even Pepe wince, without the slightest toot from a ref’s whistle.

Apparently this mode took way too much resource to justify including in subsequent releases, so it became a wonderful one-off that fans would bring up on message boards and Reddit threads for decades to come, creating an appetite which the more recent Vuelta mode wouldn’t properly satiate.

And all of those pieces give this game a timeless quality. It really is still great fun to play, even with its weatherworn visuals and rudimentary AI. It gets you into the football in a few button presses, and it seems to care about you having fun in the match you’re playing right now. Yes, nostalgia is on its side and truthfully that’s a big part of the appeal, but there’s something modern sports games can learn from the simplicity and immediacy on show here.

The World Cup 2026 will almost certainly have goals in it. Passes. Tackles. Football stuff. But will it have Luis Figo absolutely leathering a defender up and down a secondary school gym? Will it have Jose Luis Chilavert dribbling past eleven players? No it won’t. Because real football in 2026 is a depressing game of suspicious host bids, “peace” awards, on-pitch shithousery, time wasting and retiring at 28 to play in a poorly attended petrostate league. And FIFA: Road To World Cup 98’s football is smacking goals past Oliver Kahn while Blur’s "Song 2" plays, on a mission to get the Cook Islands lifting the trophy. No contest.

Phil Iwaniuk is a veteran hardware smasher and game botherer who has written for the likes of PC Format, Official PlayStation Magazine, PCGamesN, The Guardian, Eurogamer, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and IGN. He won an award once, but he doesn't like to go on about it.