Every football fan has rated a player’s performance at one time or another – but only one man has had to judge each one of them.
FIFA 23 is finally out for general release, which means it’s the annual day that Michael Muller-Mohring’s ratings are debated around the world.
“Triple M”, as he is nicknamed by the FIFA video game community, is the man behind Cristiano Ronaldo who dropped to eighth!
The 55-year-old started at EA Germany in Cologne in 2004, but served as a data collection and licensing manager for 15 years.
Muller-Mohring, a fan of German semi-professional team Fortuna Koeln, rarely plays FIFA himself after admitting he wasn’t very good.
Yet he is tasked with determining player attributes in the game alongside an army of producers and scouts across Europe.
“Every footballer is made up of 35 attributes. This then becomes the skill level that we rate on a scale of 1 to 99,” he told Stadtgefluester, via The Sun.
“Closing strength, long shots, defense, heading, free kicks, etc.”
On the need for a global team to help him, he added: “It’s because the professionals in each country need to know the history of football, understand the philosophy and anticipate developments.
“But above all, they know all the players from the bottom up.
“We are talking about 18,000 footballers who are monitored – they have to meet the database requirements fairly.”
Muller-Mohring and the rest of his team have been criticized by real players over the years, unhappy with their ratings.
“We try to make it as objective as possible. But of course we know very well that the players are going to complain,” he told Bild in 2020.
“I have only once met someone who said to me, ‘I am satisfied with my values.’ The important thing is: we don’t want to hurt anyone. But if players come in and want specific things to change, then we don’t react – unless it’s really grossly wrong.
Usually a complaint from footballers with the new FIFA ratings is about their pace – or more accurately, their perceived lack of pace!
The likes of Kyle Walker, Antonio Rudiger and even Virgil van Dijk on behalf of Joel Matip expressed their displeasure at low speed.
However, in an interview with mirror gameMuller-Mohring admitted that the hardest attribute to pin down is jumping.
The reason is that if a certain player does not jump in the game, it is impossible to know if he secretly has a Ronaldo jump in training.
Muller-Mohring was asked if he ever regrets his scores after watching an actual game where a player shows a big change of pace or scores an incredible goal from distance that doesn’t match his shooting stats.
He said: “It literally happens all the time, but you can’t settle for one-offs.
“It could have been a fluke if he hits a ball perfectly – even I can perfectly smash the ball once in 200 years into the top corner from 25 yards out, maybe if I’m lucky.
“You always want to assess a player’s performance over a number of games to make a good choice.
“If there are times when the history of sport is written like in a Champions League final, someone scores from 50 meters or whatever.
“Okay, a lot of people around the world have seen it, so it’s expected that you’ll adjust it (the stat) a bit, but if someone doesn’t score from a distance for a long time, we downgrade so it’s constantly up and down.
Muller-Mohring picked Thomas Muller as the hardest player to rate years ago and the Bayern Munich star still retains that title on FIFA 23.
He told the Mirror: “The one line I said about Muller will always bite me to the core. It wasn’t exactly smart.
“I think I literally said ‘he’s no good at anything’ – ‘He’s not super good at specific attributes’, I should have said, sorry Thomas.
“He’s by far the most difficult of any player I’ve seen and I think he always will be simply because he doesn’t excel in specific abilities.
“You would never say, ‘The world’s greatest dribbler Thomas Muller’ or ‘The world’s greatest finisher Thomas Muller’.
“It’s just, as they say in Germany, that he has a flair for a situation.
“Maybe if we did some kind of overhaul of the attribute system in the future, we could focus a bit more on the game intelligence of the players and that would take Mr. Muller to the next level!”
Better luck next year Thomas…