FIFA is a football simulator as much as Mortal Kombat is fighting simulator.

FIFA is a game.

The difference is simulator's main focus is reality, games' main focus is fun.

If FIFA was for reality it would be closer to first person QWOP than isometric view of half of field where you have perfect information and you press a key and your player does whatever trick the key was designated to perform.

The substance of the game is lost and only visuals are left.

Cars have artificial controls that are relatively easy to simulate. Any sport where the primary impact is full human body mechanics is not likely to have a sim with transferable skills.

Car racing. In car racing as a driver you typically get your input through your seat and steering wheel. Due to lack of g-forces in typical simulator this is all compressed to force feedback in steering wheel. There are really powerful steering wheels that have very high definition of vibration and forces they can transfer and this gives a lot of information about how the car is doing on the track, whether you are loosing or already lost the grip.

I’m not saying a sim is like real racing. I’m saying that human-car interface allows for play-control that maps to the real activity in a way a soccer or snowboarding game never can.

I wonder if you could achieve something vaguely approaching reality with vr and limb tracking, and some weird "soccer ball on a string" gizmo tied into the simulation.

Soccer seems like it's on the other corner of the "implementation difficulty" matrix from racing.

It's pretty easy to hook up a ffb steering wheel and pedals to a computer, actually simulating the cars and track is the hard bit.

In soccer the actual simulation would be pretty simple - it's an elastic sphere bouncing around a fairly uniform surface and being hit by mostly solid body parts/boots without too many interacting parts. But putting the user into the world in a way that they get the necessary physical feedback is much harder.

I think there's only one thing that comes closer to reality: MS Flight Simulator...

It is, as they say, As Real As It Gets.

I used MS FS5 when I got my IFR endorsement, and was able to do it in the minimum hours needed, saving me at least a grand.

MS FS was the engine for some military sims in the early 2000's, and Qantas pilots did IFR currency practice on it when I was flying in NZ.

Although the terrain was pretty good, what made MS FS acceptable for pro use were the excellent instrument panels.

or X-Plane?

Having purchased X-Plane 11 while waiting for the new MSFS, and previously coming from an unmodded copy of FSX, I have never been more disappointed in a simulator product. I don't know how a system made with more than 10 years of extra effort can fall so far behind the competition. The terrain looks like garbage and doesn't make sense (Why did you generate a high voltage power line IN the road, you know exactly where both are!?) and the roads look amateur at best, the built in planes are mediocre and uninteresting, with half of them feeling nearly unimplemented at best, ATC that is completely unusable, and somehow worse performance, with a VR mode that feels not even quarter-assed. The minimum I can say for it is the interface seems okay and usable.

I guess it's not the market leader for a reason

Another sports sim that is incredibly close to real life is Virtual Pool 4. It looks quite dated, but no other game has more realistic billiard physics that I know of.

To be fair there's quite a big difference: Lionel Messi is an individual footballer whilst in Fifa you have more control over the team strategy.

Platforms like Zwift give professional cyclists a platform to practice their skills. It's widely used and fans ride with professionals on a daily basis. You definitely can't feel the wind, but you can get the benefits from the simulation.

Sport sims help with mental strategy and positioning aspects. Being good at something isn't one dimensional.

FPV Drone Racing is a good contender I'd say. DRL uses the simulations as qualifiers for real life events.

> Being good at FIFA 19 in no way will make you good at real football.

Not that I would consider FIFA a sim, but I have to assume that, like racing, at least some knowledge of the strategy carries over.

Beside it not being a real sim, the viewpoint is completely different and the football most people play for fun is not played by the rules of the pro game.