EA Sports Deutschland has done something I've wanted to for many years - corralled a load of football players, showed them their stats in the new FIFA game and filmed their reactions. It's magnificent stuff, and the range of responses is quite, quite beautiful.
Borussia Mönchengladbach's Yann Sommer gurns like a smug boy-prince as he remarks on how good his numbers have come out, while his teammate, Julian Kobb talks about how he's 20 points behind his colleagues with a thousand-yard stare. No one fully loses it, but there's a special kind of flintiness behind the voice of André Hahn when he says "Definitely increase my pace. I am not that slow on the field." He manages to smile for a second before his eyes go dead and his head drops ever so slightly, as if he's about to stick his forehead through the camera lens.
However, the saddest - and therefore my favourite - is Bayer Leverkusen's Christoph Kramer. His clips are heartbreaking and beautiful, as he bemoans his dribbling, admits that he's much too slow in real life, making that stat realistic, then takes a handbrake turn into despair. The moment he says he wishes he could hit an overall rating of 80 because it's been his dream since 1999 is devastating from a man with an estimated net worth of $18,000,000. He tops it all off by having a minor existential crisis, explaining that he was forced to swap himself out of his own FIFA team, because he wasn't good enough.
As my second-favourite fake German (Hans Gruber, before you ask) once said:
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