Over in Europe, however, these games were non entities. “We did some research fifa 15 coins xbox and found that 90 per cent of C&VG magazine readers loved football, ” says David Gardner, the sales and marketing boss for EA Europe at the time. “So we realised that if we wanted to bring the EA Sports brand to Europe we needed a football game. ”Members of the UK team lobbied the US to let them build one. And even EA Canada’s Bruce McMillan, a Chelsea supporter who would go on to lead the FIFA development team, tried to persuade the EA hierarchy to build a football game. “I said that we should be in the worldwide football business. But when I first said that, EA was like: ‘well we are already in the football business with Madden. ’ I said: ‘No, I mean proper football’. ”

EA eventually said yes, driven in part by EA Europe's lofty sales predictions. Yet the UK team didn’t have a development studio at the time, and Mega Drive dev kits were hard to come by. So the team set out to find some local devs to help build them a prototype. “Myself and my colleague Jon Law were developing something and we were hoping that EA would sign it, ” explains Jules Burt, a UK indie developer at the time, working in Widnes, Cheshire. “I remember someone from EA travelling all the way up north to visit us, where he told us our creative project wasn't going ahead. However, he also had news of another game they wanted us to help develop – soccer. ”That ‘someone’ who visited them was producer Matt Webster, one of the few members of the original FIFA team that still works at EA today, now at Need for Speed developer Criterion. “

These guys had a Sega Genesis development kit, ” recalls Webster. “I don’t know where they got it, I probably don’t really want to know, because at the time EA couldn’t even get one. “Jon and Jules had done three tests for us. One was a side scrolling pitch, one was a forwards into the screen pitch, and the other was an isometric pitch. “I remember going up there and saw the isometric pitch and thought: ‘Wow this is interesting’. ”Burt adds: “We'd already created a prototype for a beach volleyball game on the Sega Genesis Mega Drive in Europe, so the first www.fifa14stores.co.uk attempt we had was to create a similar soccer experience. "