Kevin Ellison is a midfielder for Morecambe F.C., a League Two team in Lancashire. If you’re an entirely soccer – I mean football-ignorant American like me, that means the team is essentially fourth tier. Morecambe’s not an especially notable team, but its players – including Ellison – are all fully represented in FIFA 19. But Ellison’s in-game pace rating is worse than all of his teammates, and he’s out to prove that speed score wrong.
Ellison’s pace rating is a fairly abysmal 35, and the 39-year-old pro doesn’t feel that matches reality. “I think that’s a bit unfair,” he tells Boston public radio station WBUR. “I think there’s a bit of ageism there, where they’ve gone against me ’cause I’m nearly 40.”
Back in November, Ellison partnered with the team’s social media guy to put out a video. “We wear GPS monitors every day in training to tell us how fast we’re running – the coverage, the kilometers we run. We get the scores put up daily.” That video has Ellison boast faster real-life speeds than any of his teammates who have better FIFA ratings.
It’s unclear exactly how serious Ellison is about this, and his tone in the video is certainly a bit tongue-in-cheek. But there’s a part of me that certainly wants to see EA shuffle up the scores next year in response to all of this.
Read more: Stay speedy in the best PC racing games
FIFA 19’s best players top out with Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, and though I doubt we’ll see Ellison compete at those scales, maybe we can at least see him get a little bit over on his teammates.