There are so many new features for 10, but do you still keep an eye on what are doing with PES?

Absolutely. I've been making videogames for 13 years, so it's what I do. And I've been a massive gamer since about 30-odd years ago, so I've played PES a lot and I've played FIFA quite a bit - obviously more so in recent years. I'm inquisitive about what they're up to as a gamer as much as I am because it's the competition, so naturally we're quite interested to see what they're up to this year.

A lot of reviewers picked FIFA 09 as the better game in the PES vs. FIFA stakes last year. Do you think the same is likely to happen again this year?

I hope so! (laughs) We're fully focused on making the best-playing game we can. I hope that means that we're going to be the best football game out there, but what I'll say is that I think their game and our game are different experiences. I think ours is a very simulation-based football videogame and we do a lot of work in making sure that we're true to recreating a real simulation of football. It's interesting because that's probably a switch from how we were a few years ago.

FIFA is famous for having all the big licences. Is there any missing that you'd have liked to include?

There're loads that we'd love to include and every year we try to grow that. But we're not talking about any of it at the moment. There's always a push as football fans to get as much of that kind of stuff in and we don't always get it. We don't always get what we want. We were interviewed by some guys yesterday who were from the Netherlands and we don't have the Dutch national team licensed in the game and every year that's a fight for us to try and get. Unfortunately for the last few years that hasn't been figured out and hasn't been figured out yet for this year either, so that's a disappointment. I know as an English fan how disappointed I'd be if England weren't fully licensed, so I think everyone wants their team or wants their league or nationality in the game and we do everything we can to make it the most comprehensive game we can, but it doesn't always work out that way.

Is this the kind of thing that you could look at supplying as in the near future?

We could definitely try to do that if it was available. We have no plans to do that this year; because that's not the way we do it.

Will you continue to supply Live Season Updates like last year?

We did Live Season last year, which was a weekly update of player attributes and form based on their performance in the real world of football and we'll be talking more about things like that in the future.

We're experiencing quite a long console cycle at the moment. Are you going to be able to keep refining FIFA for the next few years or are you beginning to reach a pinnacle where you could become stuck?

Not really, no. Graphically and gameplay-wise this year we're doing a whole heap of stuff. We did a whole heap of stuff last year and I know we'll continue doing a whole heap of stuff for each year. We're lucky enough to have a team of extremely talented people making FIFA, so if we ever got to a point where we were limited by our own technology to do something, we'd rip it out and redo it so we could do more. We're not at that point yet. What we did with dribbling this year is we ripped it out and replaced it with a new system, so when we need to we can, but I don't see there being time in the near future where we're going to be stuck at a ceiling. There's tonnes left to do.

Is there ever any temptation to sneakily fidget with your favourite team's statistics a little bit?

There probably would be the temptation, but we have enough checks and monitoring in place for all the data that's used in the game. There's a ten-person team in Vancouver that manages the network and we've got a hundred people who put the data into our database, then we have a thousand people to reality check that to make sure exactly that does not happen. There're lots of checks and barriers, so we're pretty careful about that.

And which club do you support?

Leicester City.

I'm a Wolves fan.

Well, there you go.

Yes. Thanks for your time!

FIFA 10 is out October 2nd across every platform known to man.

By Richard Walker