If you, like me, are furious that your team is out of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, there’s a TikTok trend that serves as a good outlet for your rage. All you have to do is boot up FIFA 23 and get your revenge by beating the absolute piss out of, say, Sweden, racking up the score until it’s high enough that you could mistake it for a basketball game.
This “revenge game” trend isn’t new (there’s older TikTok videos of players doing similar things in NBA 2K games or boxing titles), but it is going viral during this current Women’s World Cup. When the U.S. Women’s National Team was unceremoniously booted from the round of 16 after losing to Sweden in penalty kicks, one TikTok user almost immediately uploaded a video of them walloping the Swedes in an FIFA 23 match.
The USWNT are even wearing the same uniforms they did during that fateful August 6 game, though in this version of events, they win by at least 17 goals. “Had to get my anger out,” the caption on the video reads as audio of someone aggressively breathing plays over it.
If you’re Australian and bummed that your team is no longer in the running even though you’re the host country, you can play England in FIFA 23 and pretend that late, third goal in the August 16 semi-final game never happened. Someone on TikTok already has, putting a different heavy, angry breathing audio track over a clip of Australia beating England 94-0. The on-screen graphics even perfectly match the branding for the ‘23 WWC, a testament to how dedicated FIFA 23 is to realism (except for, ya know, the score). “It’s only been 4 hours,” someone commented.
It’s unclear what settings these players are inputting in order to rack up such ridiculously high goal numbers, but FIFA 23 does have its own Women’s World Cup mode where you can select what stage you want to play in (group stage, round of 16, semi-finals, and so on), and what teams you want to see face off. It also has player ratings based on this tournament, with Australia’s Sam Kerr at the very top (no surprise there).
I don’t have FIFA 23, but I’m seriously considering getting it just so I can see the Women’s World Cup play out as it should have: Lynn Williams would start every match, Crystal Dunn would be back at forward, and Carli Lloyd and Alexi Lalas would be on mute.
