REALITY IS BORING: PRO EVO’S MASTER LEAGUE WAS SOMETHING SPECIAL

In his seminal book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, American author Joseph Campbell teaches us that all great origin myths and hero stories are dependent on opposites and a transition from the mortal to the divine, eventually returning to the living world to save the day. It’s not an easy read, like, not one for the beach, but in The Hero... Campbell had no idea he’d written a prophecy that would be fulfilled to the absolute fullest fifty-nine years later.

Spring and autumn. Bitter and sweet.

A 23-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo, on the verge of a move to Real Madrid, in a Portugal jersey, and a post-injuries, 28-year-old Michael Owen in a Newcastle United jersey. Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 embodied the spirit of a classic monomyth in its cover image and never erred from it. In the days before online gaming was really a thing and you could still remember what your mates looked like in real life, PES had the greatest feature ever created for a football game.

They called it Masutārīgu—MASTER LEAGUE.

For around seven years of my life, I cared more for my Master League team than I did for any real (and what is “real” anyway?) team. The Master League was a feature in Pro Evolution Soccer in which you could choose to begin with a team of default players for your chosen “real” club, or either of the default teams—‘PES United’ or ‘WE United’ (standing for ‘Winning Eleven United’, after Pro Evo’s Japanese name). These two teams had their own respective rosters of fictional players, but if you wanted a proper, personalised journey, you’d choose to make your own club. Most of the default lads were distinctly average, some of them were next-level useless, and one of them was a Brazilian hero called Castolo. 

I want Zinedine Zidane to return as a sprightly youth prospect, rising like Lazarus with a velvet first touch, his prematurely balding pate all aflame.