Back Pocket Memory rocking the Bethlehem Steel shirt on stage.

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Images via Gerard Pitpitan

Ever since we started Bumpy Pitch, the one constant that we have ran into is the question of “why?’ Why start a company based upon the lifestyle of soccer. Why don’t we make performance equipment that is sold in soccer stores. Why don’t we make jerseys? And…why do we sell our clothes for the prices that we do. This last question comes into play sometimes more than others, and with the recent release of our hoodies, some people started asking it again.

This is not the first draft of this story I have put together dealing with the issue of cost. We haven’t published or shared any of them because I thought I had some particular direction or point that we wanted to get across. I had planned on sharing things like industry standards, formulas that clothing companies use to set prices and how based upon our cost of goods, we actually charge less for our clothes than what the “industry” deems as normal practices. In the end, it seemed less important to focus on the formulas, cost of goods and industry standards and more on “why” it is we do what we do.

People have often been skeptical about our approach to create premium apparel using soccer as our inspiration. We’ve been told that the average soccer fan would scoff at our viewpoint and not support a soccer inspired apparel brand that had a different outlook on things. We’ve been told that we would alienate consumers, and that if we just charged less that we would be much more successful and much bigger. But the thing is, we have to be true to who we are, what we hope to achieve and to ultimately stay in the lane that we have chosen to ride in. I believe that soccer, and soccer fans, should demand more and have the belief that we deserve better than the bare minimums. Or at the very least, be more supportive when people do more than talk about it, but be about it. Whether that is TV coverage, media support or the clothes that we are able to buy. It may be a new direction, but we should be okay with the price that is associated with premium apparel that supports our sport and pays homage to our passion. Spending $20 – $30 to park our car in a lot to watch a game for 90 minutes is acceptable, $12 for a beer at a stadium that would normally cost $4… but using premium materials, embracing domestic manufacturing and relying on tremendous passion to create the best product that we can wear for years gets knocked?

Part of our mission is that we feel that soccer fans deserve amazing quality products. That’s not an attempt to knock what is currently on the market, but we never wanted to simply re-create what is already out there (which has been suggested to us).  That’s never what we’ve been about in any manner of our lives. In fact, if I take a broader approach… if we wanted to do things and fit in with everyone else, then being an American soccer player and fan would probably have never been our choice of things to become. But it was never a choice for me. I was drawn to the sport, regardless of what other people thought about it and I have always stayed true to that. And that same mentality and outlook carries over into the clothes that we create, our approach with The Original Winger and our entire philosophy of what we do. It might not always be the most accepted approach, but neither has being an American soccer fanatic.

We understand if what we do isn’t for everybody. But we’ll continue to stay in our lane, be who we are and stay true to the vision that we have always had. It may be a bit different, a bit out of the comfort zones for some people and difficult for some to understand. But that sounds awfully familiar to the plight of the American soccer fan.

And finally, we read all the comments and emails that get sent in that are both positive and negative. Some of the support is amazing, and some of the feedback is not so amazing. But we read it all, talk about it and try to digest both the good and the bad. Thanks for the support and know that we’ll keep being honest about who we are, what we do and “why” we choose to do the things that we do.

If you haven’t done so recently, make sure you head over to our site The Original Winger for a daily look at the lifestyle and culture of soccer.

Our boy Jacy representing in a Bumpy Pitch San Francisco Gales tee.

It’s crazy to see where Bumpy Pitch t-shirts pop up at. When we started BP, we wanted to give soccer people something that they could wear that helped to define the lifestyle of the sport. But, we also hoped that it would be embraced and worn in places and by people that would push the sport into new places that maybe it hadn’t really gone before. To push the lifestyle of the sport, it has to reach outside the lines and spread to new people. This video is a pretty classic example of that.

Props to Johnny for the link.

You might not know Gary Paterson by name, yet. But you absolutely know him by the work he and his team at EA Sports do. As Creative Director of the FIFA franchise for EA Sports, Gary is tasked with leading the development of the hugely popular FIFA video game. With their recent release of FIFA 2010, I had the chance to sit down and talk with Gary about all things FIFA. Hit the jump to check out my conversation with the guy who just might have your ultimate dream job.

Let’s start with your background. Where you came from and your journey to get where you are at today. – I was brought up in a little town in the highlands of Scotland. My father ran the local football team so I played football from an early age. My dad also ran the Aberdeen supporters club so we traveled to Aberdeen every weekend to watch them play football. I ended up going to university in Scotland for computer science and then I got a job making football management games as a software engineer in England. After a couple of years of doing that I got a job here making FIFA Manager and then got a job on FIFA. I then switched from software engineer to creative director a couple of years ago. I guess that’s it in a nutshell.

It sounds like you get to marry your two passions with your job. – Yeah I think I’m really lucky. I think I was about 14 years old when I identified that I wanted to work in video games. As soon as I started working in England I identified FIFA as something I wanted to come and do. At the time I was a Pro Evo fan but I saw great potential in FIFA and I wanted to come and help these guys try and help grow the game. It’s been a dream job for me. I must admit that most days I look forward to coming into work because I’m working on something I love. Getting to work and playing on a football video game, sitting here making changes to the game…it’s exciting to try and make it more like football. So I guess it’s the dream job for me.

It sounds like it. It’s great that somebody that is such a fan of the sport and of video games is in charge of the direction of the game. – Over the last five years the studio has really worked on turning around the fortunes of the game. One big part of that was to make sure that the team is filled in the key positions with people who are passionate about football. For me coming from a football background, playing football video games, watching football and playing football my whole life it’s good for me. And the guys working with me here…I’ve got a Jamaican – Canadian who played football for the Jamaica under -21s, we’ve got a Colombian producer that’s on the game play team here. All three of us are steeped in football history, but with slightly different slants. I mean I’m a guy who likes to get the ball and pass it so the football games I’ve tried to create are influenced by that, whereas a guy I’ve got here is really skillful at football and he likes to do the skill moves and maybe showboat a bit. So there’s a nice blend of football backgrounds and I think that’s important for FIFA as well. With it being such a global game and with so many people wanting so many different things from the game, so I think that’s an important thing as well. I don’t know how many nationalities we have on the game, but we have people from all over the world, and I think that helps us make a game that is geared towards a global audience.

I think that’s a great point. Being well represented by many nationalities within the FIFA Family of engineers and people that work on the game must be important for the development of the game. – Yeah it sparks debate here which is always healthy. We have an Argentinean guy on the team who likes to put a lot of dirty things in the game. Like when slide tackles weren’t allowed if the ball was in the air. We were all like why would someone slide if the ball was in the air, but he was like “no, no, no! If a guy is in the air you still want to be able to bring him down.” So it helps in discussions but it also helps in presentation and with understanding atmospheres. A South American game is different than a game in the UK, and its different in Italy, and Spain and in all the individual countries. So it helps us to have this rich mixture of nationalities on the team to help us with these things as well. For me coming from the UK you don’t always understand the kind of cultural significance of football in the different nationalities and I think that’s very important for us.

I think so too. As you know, all of us soccer fans can be pretty picky and if one thing is off within the game it becomes a very big deal. How do you guys approach this when designing the game? – We do have resources at our disposal. We have community forums and in the last year EA Sports as a whole has made a big deal about reaching out to the community and to have conversations with them like we’ve never had before. We had a policy before where the development team weren’t allowed to speak to the community for various reasons, but now that’s a very open door policy. Now you will see that the dev teams are on the forums communicating with the members of the community. As far as FIFA goes, we have relationships with key community members and we bring them over to the studio midway through development and we show them the game and we get a great chance to speak with them. I actually got an email this morning from one of the UK community guys and I’m going to set up a conference call with them and they are going to run me through a list of things that they would like to see changed in the game. The game has been released in Europe for over a month and they’ve been playing pretty hard core, so they have this list of features they want to talk about. So if you can reach out to the community and have those conversations and have those relationships then you can maybe try and understand more what the fans want. But it’s almost an impossible task to try and please everyone. Some people want us to concentrate on the match day atmosphere, where there are a lot of people that just want game play and don’t really care about these other things, then there are other people who care passionately about manager mode. There are so many different avenues we could explore. I think the dev team has to look at all of these and try to prioritize what are the most important things to build for the largest amount of people. We’re never going to satisfy everyone, but hopefully people can see that we are trying our best to make the game that they want to play.

Satisfying everyone is an impossible task! You brought up the new community involvement initiative from EA Sports where the development team gets involved and interacts with the community. Regardless of the business or product, brands seem to really be trying to engage their fans or consumers, and making them a part of the process, and this seems to be the case for EA Sports. – Yeah definitely. I think a few years ago at FIFA, community feedback was important for us, but not as important as it is now. Two or three years ago we knew that the game was rated 80, 82, 83 and it was obvious for us where we needed to go to improve it. The dev team, we kind of had the guts of what we knew was the vision so we didn’t really need that much feedback because we knew where we were going. But now we’re kind of almost reaching the pinnacle and we need to start exploring more avenues so it’s more important to us now. And we have more time to devote to smaller features because the game fundamentally works and is fundamentally strong and so I think for us it’s very important for those reasons. But it’s also very important in general. With things like Facebook, Twitter and message forums, it is important to stay connected with people, and I think the community expects this from us as well.

As an extension of that, we want our product to be not just something we sell and forget, but something that we sell and continue to develop throughout the year. I don’t know if you know about our Live Season feature. What happens with Live Seasons is that the game can get modified every single week depending on what happens in the real world. Say Rooney scores a hat trick on the weekend, if you have the Live Seasons subscription, you can download his new stats and his new form for his game for how he played at the weekend. So the game is dynamically changing all the time. We want to extend the experience of FIFA throughout the year and that is something we are very keen to do. We’ve got online tournaments with FIFA interactive World Cup, this year we’ve got the pro club championship which is like our 10 v 10 competition and these things extend throughout the whole year. So its important for us to be in communication with the consumer throughout the whole year and keep them engaged in our product and keep getting the feedback that they are giving us. These are very important elements in how we manage our relationships with our consumers.

You mentioned that the game is much more dynamic now. The product that you ship isn’t necessarily the product that it ends up being, with you guys constantly updating the game throughout the year. It’s almost like a living organism. – We obviously release it at the start of the football season and the football world is a living dynamic thing that chances every week. So for us with FIFA, we want to mimic that and keep people engaged in our world of football throughout the year. For authenticity sake, we want to mimic what’s happening in the real world of football and keep people engaged in our product in a fun and authentic manner the whole year. We get our lead example of what’s happening from the real world and football is a thing that changes all the time so we try to do that as well.

It’s amazing that technology is at a point where that is even possible. With making changes and updates and developing the game as its already been released, how much of a problem does that present to you and the development team? – I think it adds to the challenge. Inherently FIFA is a challenge because football is a seasonal game. Every year we are expected to release, a game so that in itself gives us a finite amount of time to make changes. Thankfully the execs at EA have given FIFA a large team of people to make those changes so we can still make significant changes year on year. Even from a base point of view, developing a game every year is a challenge in itself. Most games have a little longer than a year to develop, so that in itself is a challenge. Add on top of that the dynamic nature of football, which we want to mimic, and the way we want to keep the game fresh throughout the year, it adds on another layer of complexity. But I think it’s a challenge that all of us here are excited about. Most of the people here are passionate about football. I wouldn’t say everyone is, we have some really smart technical people who aren’t football maniacs, but they like football.

It’s interesting to see some of the people here learn about football and get interested in it. We’ve got a couple engineers here who weren’t football fans at the start, but they started getting into it and then even started playing football on our field here at the stadium. They started playing more and asking about tactics and getting more into it. I think having people like that on the team helps us keep the game fresh as well. Having people with different backgrounds and different levels of understanding of the game helps us to understand what we can put in the game to keep it fresh.

Back to the challenge of FIFA, we knew where we needed to go before our game was rated a 90. We knew what we needed to do to get to a 90. Now that we are a 90 where do we go from here? We have to keep the game fresh and exciting but we don’t want to break what we have. So it’s a challenge for us to decide how do we get from 90 to 91 and 92. It’s a new and exciting challenge for us but we’re definitely very excited about it and it’s a nice place to be.

You mentioned that some of the more tech guys weren’t football fans, but through working on the game they became fans of the sport. I have friends of mine who were never soccer fans, but then they started playing FIFA and the video game was the catalyst for them to become actual fans of the sport. – That’s really great to hear! I think once we started creating a great video game it crossed the realm from being just a sports simulation to being a really fun and entertaining game. When FIFA was maybe in the mid 80’s range of Metacritic, maybe the game only appealed to people really interested in football. But once it gets in to the 90 Metacritic, at that point, people who are just gamers start giving it a chance because it’s bound to be good. So new people will start playing it and they will find it enjoyable and challenging so they will like it from a game point of view, but that can kind of build a liking for the sport as well.

I’ve never really heard many people mention that before, so its really quite nice to hear. Maybe we can start getting royalties for whatever teams they start to support!

It’s funny you mention that. My friends that have become fans of the sport via FIFA, end up supporting in real life the team that they play with in the game. I actually think it’s a great medium for people to get introduced to the sport. Some people who are new to the sport have difficulty in sitting down for 90 minutes and watching a game when they don’t understand the intricacies of it. But something like FIFA, it can be a much easier way to digest the sport for people who might not be dedicated fans of the sport. As a result of that you can become a fan through alternate mediums, as opposed to just sitting and watching a game. I think this works particularly well in introducing new fans to the sport in the United States. – That’s interesting. I think what you’re saying is that by playing the game you start to understand how difficult and how challenging certain things are with the sport. Or how rewarding certain things are. So when you begin to understand some of the intricacies by playing the video game then when you watch the game it becomes more interesting to you. What I’ve heard before is that the low scoring in soccer doesn’t really appeal to American sports fans. But maybe if they understand the depth of the sport then they can appreciate something like a passing play that resulted in a shot but not necessarily a goal. So maybe it becomes more enjoyable for them as they begin to understand the game better. That’s a really interesting take on it.

Yeah, I mean if someone is playing the video game and they start to better understand the small things like runs off the ball, or keeping possession and building play through midfield, and how important these things are. I think this helps people appreciate the sport on a different level. It’s amazing that technology and something as fun as FIFA can actually be tools to help create new fans. That’s pretty remarkable. – Hopefully it helps. It would be great to see football become bigger in the United States. FIFA has been doing well in the United States recently, so maybe we can help each other drive fans to the sport. It would be great for football to have a bigger presence in North America.

After the release of FIFA 2010, how quickly does the work begin on the next release? – Before its released. Basically what we do every year is we’ll come up with ideas to work on. Some of them are too big to be done in the current year, so we put them on the back burner. Maybe about 2 ½ months ago we already had ideas of what we wanted to put in 2011. They were ideas that we had before or ideas that we had been working on in the background. Because there’s only a year we can’t lose momentum. We can’t shut down and bask in the glory of what we have done or have a think about what we need to do again. We can’t let the engine that is FIFA grind to a halt and then try and get it back up going again. It’s very important that we keep it going at all times. For that to happen we have to have ideas in advance. One of the goals of the team was to almost have the big ideas designed for FIFA 2011 done before FIFA 2010 hit the shelves. We didn’t quite manage it all, but it was an important thing. It can be a bit relentless sometimes because it never stops. There’s not any time to sit back and enjoy what you just created. We’ve been striving to achieve a 90 rated Metacritic for five years, it was a goal that we had set out to achieve. We’ve done that now, but there’s no time to stop. We just have to keep going and innovating and try to find those improvements. We don’t really stop, we just keep going. We’re already pretty deep into 2011 and we’ve got all the ideas panned out and the game is moving forward already. Its tough but it can be rewarding too.

Congratulations on achieving the 90 rating! – Thank you

I’m curious if there is anything special in mind with this being FIFA 2010 and the World Cup coming up in 2010. Is there any relationship between what might take place in the game in a World Cup year as opposed to a non World Cup year? – Its something we think about and we try to build ideas around. I can’t talk specifics about what we’re going to do, but it’s certainly something that’s planted in our minds. Trying to build our games and build some hype around the fact that it is a World Cup year. Everyone is going to be talking about the World Cup once the group stages are announced. Starting then, the whole FIFA organization both in video games and in the real world are going to start gearing themselves for the World Cup. So it’s important for us to tap into that, but there’s nothing specifically in FIFA 2010 right now that talks to the World Cup. But tits certainly something we’re thinking about, but as I said, nothing that I can talk about right now.

Fair enough, I can understand that. Something that I’m particularly interested in is how brands communicate messages. The ad campaign that’s going along with FIFA 2010 about “How big can soccer get” is great. I think it’s a really engaging campaign. Is that something you have your hands in as well, or is it left to EA and an ad agency? – I think the marketing and PR departments get together with an ad agency and brainstorm about how to get the message across for what our game is about this year. Last year we started monitoring how many games of FIFA were played through our internal telemetry system that can feedback information to us about what people have been doing with their games so we can use it to better design the games. If no one is playing a certain mode then that can indicate to us to know that the mode might be bad, or that people don’t know about it or that people just don’t want to play that one. It helps us to understand what people like about our game. So we have all this telemetry and one of the things that we get from it is how many games are being played. I think that over the course of FIFA 2009 there was something like over 400 million games played, and so this kind of spawned the idea and motivation for that kind of campaign. No one could have imagined that there were 400 million games played, so I think that’s where the trigger for that was. If you go to our website you will see a rotating globe and it tells you what different people are doing inside of FIFA at the present time. It tells you what clubs are most popular online, it tells you how many games of FIFA are being played online so far. So I think a lot of this was the spawn for that campaign, but as I said I wasn’t directly involved with that.

Unbelievable to think the game was played 400 million times last year. Not a lot of products get that amount of interaction with their consumers. How does it feel to be involved with something that is such a big part of millions of people’s lives? – It feels really good but it also feels a bit stressful. We know that if the game is going to get played so many times that the balance of the game has to be right. If there’s exploits from the game it will ruin the experience for those 400 millions games. I think it motivates us more than anything else. You know how many people are going to play it, you know that people are going to scrutinize it, so it kind of motivates you and keeps you on your toes. Everyone here wants to release something they are proud of and if we release something that is going to get played that many times we need to reduce exploits (exploits being things like an “always score,” where you do a certain sequence of moves and it always results in a goal) which we’ve tried to do over the last number of years. Making sure that these things don’t happen and that the game reacts correctly in many different circumstances. People play the game differently. Some people play with all the tactics, some people change the formations, some people play short passing, some play long passing, some people shoot from half way, and we want to make sure the game responds authentically in all those situations. It just keeps us on our toes and makes us work really hard so that the game we release is something we are proud of because the game is going to be played so many times. I did feel a bit shocked when I heard how many times it had been played. It did feel a bit special.

How is it being able to work with some of the pros that come by the studio? – I must admit that we had Sacha here in April or May and he was the nicest player that I’ve worked with so far. He wanted to make sure everyone had fun. It’s not always like that. Some pros might not play the game, or the language barrier can cause some problems so it can be a bit difficult.

A lot of pros are really big fans of the game. Making a game based on them and knowing that they are such big fans has to be cool for you guys. – It’s interesting to hear. I didn’t really think that that many pros are into the game as maybe they are. It’s not something I’ve noticed before. I’ve only met a few pros so far so I don’t really know. Maybe we can set up some games with pros and the dev team.

For sure! I know some of the young American pros are always challenging people to games via outlets like Twitter. – That’s wicked! I know that the guys on the team here would get a big kick out of that. Knowing that pros are into the game that we work so hard on producing is pretty cool.

Technically speaking the game has advanced so much. Where do you see the relationship between sports and technology, specifically with the video game market going? Its incredible now and I cant imagine where its going. – In terms of the game there’s still room for improvement, There are a lot of different avenues we can explore. We’ve been in contact with a team that rates players. They’ve got this system that would tell you roughly how good a game a player had by analyzing what he did during the game.. We have a system ourselves, but it would be good to have some real life input into that. There are all these different kinds of real world avenues we can explore. In terms of artificial intelligence, I think the AI of our players is strong in comparison to everything sports related that’s out there right now. But there’s still a long ways to go with that. I think video games are something that have tended to concentrate on graphics and animation and the AI side of things hasn’t been as high of a priority. So I think there’s a lot that we can do to make players respond and behave as they do in real life. There’s a lot we can do with physics and animation to make the physics of what happens in a game better. Things like fighting for position or pulling shirts, and these sorts of things can be improved. FIFA has great animation but there’s always room for improvement. And with the online play, online doesn’t really factor into real world sport, but we can try and mimic the dynamic nature of real world sport online. Maybe we have league tables on line with 10 v 10 teams or maybe we can surface the live season that we have and people can interact with our game in similar fashion to the way real football is played out. I think there is still a lot we can do and certainly we have a lot of ideas. I think at EA we’ve taken great leaps in this generation of consoles at simulating football and simulating sport, but I think there’s a lot of tough challenges left and those will fundamentally change the way football games and sports games are played.

I know you can download and play the games on an iPhone now. How important is mobile gaming for the future of where things are headed? –We know there are millions and millions of football fans out there, and there are lots of different ways they want to interact with football. Maybe there are people that don’t want to play the game on their PS3 or Xbox, maybe they want to play it on their mobile. Maybe they want to play on their PC. So we’re starting more FIFA online initiatives as well. I think football being such a huge sport and having so many people who are interested gives us a lot of ways to interact with them with mobile phones being just one of them. As I said, we have a couple of things on the mobile phone right now and maybe we can look to expand that in the future.

Do you ever get to just sit back and play the game for fun and just turn off work mode? – I don’t know, probably not. What usually happens is that by the time the game gets released I’ve played it so much all I can see are the things I want to improve. I’ve been playing it online at home recently and all I see are the things that I want us to improve on. Whereas my friend who comes over and plays the game with me sees all the beauty of it and all I see are the things that need to be improved. So it’s kind of difficult to switch off. I think the closest it comes to really being able to just play it and have fun is during development where we’ve just put a cool new feature in. That’s the only thing we see at the time. We’re playing the game and there’s this really cool new feature and it kind of overwhelms your experience. I’ll have games against other producers here and it turns into an emotional battle to see who wins and we just have fun with the new features that were putting in mid-development. I don’t know that I can ever switch it off. As soon as you start working in video games you start thinking about all video games differently and you start analyzing them differently. I think sometimes it can spoil the fun a little bit.

Do you play with Aberdeen? – I do play with Aberdeen. But a couple of the producers here who sit by me play with Chelsea and Arsenal. One is a Chelsea fan from Colombia and one is an Arsenal fan from Jamaica. They play with these top teams so I kind of have to follow suit so I end up choosing Chelsea or Manchester United. Aberdeens old manager Alex Ferguson, who is the most successful manager ever at Aberdeen is the manager of Manchester United so I have a soft spot for him.

I really appreciate you taking the time to sit and chat with us. – No problem mate, it’s been great. Thank you.

We talk a lot around here about the lifestyle of soccer and people are always asking me what we mean by that. I guess the easy answer is that soccer carries over into all areas of our lives. The on the field aspect is easy to understand, but how we incorporate soccer in the rest of our lives is not always so cut and dry. So I’m going to let this picture do the talking for me. This is my boy Jacy who is clearly getting it in and doing his thing skating. Yet he is repping for the sport in a Bumpy Pitch shirt and by doing so, living the lifestyle that we always refer to. Soccer can be present in a lot of ways in your daily life, and this is a prime example of that.

Thanks to Jacy for the picture and props to Anna Fenley for snapping the pic.

For those of you that haven’t seen it yet, the second part of the Bumpy Pitch project (our online magazine), The Original Winger just got a new look and design. It’s only part one of lots of new things that will be dropping in the coming months. Stay tuned for much, much more…

Quick reminder that orders need to be placed by Friday December 18th for guaranteed delivery by Christmas. Get those orders in and we’ll get them out asap!

ESPN Soccernet writer Mark Lomas has put together a story where he lists the biggest soccer stories of the decade. Starting with the Galacticos of Real Madrid in 2000 and culminating with Real Madrid for 2009 (their signing of Cristiano Ronaldo). It’s crazy to think that the decade is coming to an end, and crazy to think back on all the soccer stories that have taken place over the last ten years. Click here to see the full article and see if you agree with him on his picks.