What Sports Have the Best Offseasons for Video Games?

On a night filled with drama and mess as the Maxx Crosby trade cancellation came through, I feel the universe is speaking to me and telling me it’s a good call to talk about the offseasons that work best in video games today.

Professional sports leagues all want to matter 12 months out of the calendar year and stay in the news throughout, but it’s not that easy to pull off. Plus, wall-to-wall media coverage at all times in the year does not necessarily mean you translate well to sports video games either.

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However, what does undeniably work for video games is having something — anything — to do. By default, this means certain professional sports leagues have a leg up based on the league calendar, while others do themselves no favors.

Of course, more goes into it then just “activities” to do as well. What’s on the line, how much chaos is unleashed, how’s the schedule line up, and how much can a team or league change in a single offseason? These are all reasonable things to ask as you think about how much fun there is to be had in a video game offseason.

I’m also only going to worry about team sports. Apologies go out to something like the PGA, but I’m looking for team management more than personal betterment when it comes to this exercise.

Lastly, the rankings are not about critiquing the video games themselves in this instance. I’m a firm believer that one of a video game’s biggest jobs if it’s a sports game is to bring the strengths of the sport itself to light, but I won’t take away points for a video game’s failures this time around.

I’m going to rank these from worst to first, and I’m going to stick with the “major” pro leagues as those are the ones in our biggest sports games. If you have other suggestions for what lesser known pro leagues would be great in a video game, let me know on Discord. (Does cricket secretly have some crazy offseason?)

Worst To First: The Best Offseasons For Video Games

EA FC (EPL/La Liga/etc.)

No sport has a bigger calendar issue than the major soccer leagues. They all have fully booked schedules that mean offseasons aren’t really offseasons. In addition, the one league that has the oddball schedule (MLS) doesn’t matter enough to really make it any different.

On some level, this means the schedule should work in its favor because there should be plenty to do when you’re not playing games. And, it’s true, there is a lot of stuff to do. The problem is it’s not unique stuff.

There are multiple transfer windows in a season, you’re always training, and you’re always getting ready for international play. You’re also focused on a single league (most of the time), so it doesn’t really matter that there are hundreds of teams and players because you’re not worried about most of them.

This does mean soccer has a very good in-season schedule because there’s a lot to do at all times besides playing your games. But that’s not what this is about as we’re talking offseasons, and you get no credit based on this incredibly arbitrary baseline I’ve put in place — sucks to suck soccer.

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