USA Men’s Team Shown Love in FIFA11

If you’ve ever owned an Xbox 360, then I hope that you’ve had the opportunity to play the greatest sports game ever created, FIFA Soccer. This years installment FIFA11, is by far the best and most realistic version of the game, and blows away all other competition such as Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer 11 and EA Sports other soccer game, FIFA Street.

As I was playing with the United States national team on Xbox Live a couple of days ago, I noticed that the rosters had been updated. Xbox Live updates the rosters and stats of players and teams, so that they match and coincide with the way that the teams and players are actually playing in real life. EA Sports usually does a good job with this, and makes the teams and players rankings as realistic as possible.

As far as playing with the United States went, it was nice to see the changes finally made. I had enough of playing with Robbie Findley as the other striker alongside Jozy Altidore. The fact that Findley wasn’t even on the bench as a reserve made it that much better. He should probably never play for the national team again. Brian Ching was still on the bench before the update was made, which always annoyed me since he hasn’t played a meaningful game for us in years. I was glad to see him gone too and nowhere to be found.

Stuart Holden and Jermaine Jones were inserted into the starting lineup in the midfield, as well as Maurice Edu at center back. Young stars such as Tim Ream, Juan Agudelo, and Teal Bunbury were on the bench as reserves, which was good to see. The line-up was a legitimate one, as I smacked some dude playing with Mexico about three of four times in a row, before he had to quit.

But what struck me the most was that the US team’s midfield ranking had grown to a 77. The attacking ranking of 73, and defense ranking of 72 had stayed the same, but the midfield ranking had grown some points. Now you might be thinking that a 77 isn’t that great, but Spain, who has the greatest midfield in the world, was ranked as an 84. Not too shabby to be only 7 points behind the best team in the game. The only other countries that were ahead of us in midfield ranking were Argentina, Brazil, Croatia, England, France, Italy, Germany, Holland, and Portugal.

 

The players rankings had also gone up as well. Stuart Holden who’s having his best season ever at Bolton this year, had gone from a 72 ranking before the update, to a 79 ranking. Clint Dempsey also went up a point from 79 to 80. Now when I play with the USA on Xbox Live, I can actually compete with Spain and Holland and all of the other awesome teams.

So if you happen to be playing FIFA11 on Xbox Live in the future, take a look at the US national team and their updated, new look roster. It’s nice to see that EA sports and FIFA11 have given them the recognition that they rightly deserve. Maybe one day, they’ll have the best team in the game.