FIFA Football 2002

FIFA Football 2002 (known as FIFA Soccer 2002: Major League Soccer in North America and FIFA 2002: Road to FIFA World Cup in Japan), commonly known as FIFA 2002, is a 2001 soccer video game produced by Electronic Arts and published by EA Sports. FIFA 2002 is the ninth game in the FIFA series. In order to achieve a higher level of difficulty, power bars for passes were introduced and dribbling was reduced. The power bar can also be adjusted to the player's preferences. The game also includes club emblems for many more European clubs, as well as for major Dutch clubs such as PSV, AFC Ajax and Feyenoord, although there was no Dutch league (they fell under the "rest of the world" heading). This game also includes the Swiss Super League for the first time, but at the expense of the Greek league. A card reward system licensed by Panini was also introduced, where a star player card is unlocked after winning a certain competition. There is also a bonus game with the nations that automatically qualified for the 2002 World Cup (France, Japan and South Korea), in which the player tries to improve the FIFA ranking of his chosen team by participating in international friendlies. Many of the international teams in the game are unlicensed (some of them down to the player names like the Netherlands), as are smaller countries like Barbados, which were only given numbers as player names. Also, this was the last FIFA edition to date (not counting the World Cup versions) to feature the Japanese national team, as the Japanese Football Association ceded exclusive rights to Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer series. FIFA Football 2002 was the last FIFA to have only one person on the cover for 10 years before Lionel Messi appeared on FIFA 13 alone.