Online FIFA coaching: does it work?

Chris Berrow - You can now get FIFA lessons online to improve your football skills!

BPart Gaming offer this service online from Germany… so I spoke to Georg Raffelt who runs the business...

Georg - We started about seven years ago, like in 2013. Um, but back then we did it ourselves. Like we were good players at FIFA and we like figured that, you know, we could teach, uh, other people our skills and help them out and maybe earn a little something on the side. What did people say to you when they come to the company.

Chris - And if they say, I want to get better at FIFA? Like what are they specifically looking to improve? Is it they like their defense, their speed, pressing the buttons?

t Georg绝对最大的一个弱点hat that many people have. Um, I would say most of the people who come just feel stuck. There's like so much content out there. You could go ahead and ask yourself like, why book a coaching with a private coach if you have all this free content available on YouTube, right? There is so many tutorials, so many good advice. Um, but the problem is that even from watching the videos and getting some, some clear instructions what to do in certain scenarios, people don't realize their own mistakes or they tried to implement, let's say a certain school move or a defending technique, but they miss out on a crucial point and still do a mistake there. But they, they're not able to reflect on that and like to, to analyze it themselves. And that's where the coaching really comes in. Where like the coach has, has a different, uh, view on the, on the game player from guys. So then he can go ahead analyze a certain crucial mistake and break the deadlock basically and, and help the guy really understand how FIFA is played and which mechanics are important and what kind of situation.

Chris - And the coaches themselves have to presumably have a lot of experience at playing FIFA and to be able to demonstrate that they have a certain level of expertise. Because, you know, you must kind of be able to say, well actually we have people who are, you know, in the top 100 players online or something. There must be some kind of way of quantifying how good your coaches are.

Georg - Yeah, for sure. Um, there's something called the weekend league, which is implemented in FIFA since four years now. I think it started with, uh, FIFA 17. Um, and that's basically a competition which every player can play in games. So it's available for, for everyone. You don't have to register on a certain side or something. That's why it really took competitive FIFA. And I'm kind of, um, putting your skill on a scale to the next level for FIFA. And there you play 30 games a weekend and then how many, uh, winds you get determines which rank you get. And then we have, um, a certain rank, which is, um, required for our coaching. And then also our coaching is, um, divided into three tiers. So there's like basic tier, advanced tier and the elite tier. And um, the skill level also differs in each tier.