There was a time in FIFA Ultimate Team when finding a genuinely brilliant player didn’t require completing an 18-squad SBC, opening a promotional pack or deciphering whatever a PlayStyle+ is. Honestly, the game is literally gone.
Sometimes you just needed a few hundred coins and a German striker from Nürnberg. And you weren’t longing for more.
Alexander Esswein’s FIFA 13 card is one of the great examples of a player becoming famous within a football game for reasons almost completely detached from his real-life career. He was quick, strong, cheap, wonderfully effective and, to anyone unfortunate enough to defend against him, thoroughly irritating.
More than a decade later, his 75-rated card remains regularly mentioned among the great overpowered Ultimate Team players.
If you were there, you probably already know why.
Who Was Alexander Esswein?
Esswein was a 22-year-old German forward playing for 1. FC Nürnberg when FIFA 13 arrived in 2012. He’d joined the Bundesliga club from Dynamo Dresden the previous year and was a perfectly respectable top-flight player, but certainly not somebody being discussed alongside Germany’s emerging generation of Marco Reus, Mario Götze, Thomas Müller and Mesut Özil.
His FIFA card suggested much the same.
Esswein was rated just 75 overall. His Ultimate Team card gave him 70 shooting, 67 passing, 75 dribbling and 73 heading. Decent enough, but nothing that should have caused widespread distress across Xbox Live and PlayStation Network.
Then you saw the other number. 90 pace.
His underlying figures included 91 acceleration and 89 sprint speed, accompanied by 84 shot power and 76 strength.
And suddenly the 75 rating didn’t seem quite so relevant. Or important in the grand scheme of things, to be honest.
Why FIFA 13 Was Built for Players Like Esswein
To understand why Esswein became so effective, you have to remember what FIFA 13 actually felt like to play.
Pace was king.
Through balls behind a defensive line could be devastating, quick strikers were enormously useful and there was something beautifully uncomplicated about assembling an Ultimate Team around players who could simply run very, very fast.
Esswein was among the fastest German players available on FIFA 13. His 90 pace actually matched Marco Reus, despite Reus carrying a considerably higher 84 overall rating.
FIFA 13’s transfer market still allowed players to build genuinely competitive teams without accumulating enormous amounts of currency. Contemporary guides were recommending bargain hunting through the auction house, where useful gold cards could be picked up for only a few hundred coins.
Alexander Esswein suited that era perfectly.
The Stats Didn’t Explain How Good He Felt
This is where FIFA nostalgia gets wonderfully unscientific.
Anyone can look at the card now and see 90 pace. What the numbers can’t properly recreate is how ridiculously effective Esswein sometimes felt once a match started.
His 70 shooting shouldn’t have been particularly frightening, yet contemporary FIFA players were already joking that his shooting performed considerably above the number displayed on his card. One FIFA 13 forum discussion recommending hidden gems quickly received the response that Esswein wasn’t a hidden gem at all because everybody already knew how broken he was.
That reputation survived.
Years later, Sports Illustrated included Esswein among the greatest Ultimate Team bargains, remembering a card whose fairly ordinary shooting and dribbling numbers seemed irrelevant once he actually got near goal. Red Bull similarly included him among the most overpowered FUT players ever.
He Was Perfect for a Cheap Bundesliga Team
This was perhaps the best part.
FIFA 13 Bundesliga squads were fun.
Marco Reus was sensational. Mario Götze was becoming one of Europe’s most exciting young players. Players such as André Schürrle, Sidney Sam and Jefferson Farfán offered serious pace elsewhere, while Ultimate Team’s old chemistry system rewarded building around shared leagues and nationalities.
Then, up front, you could throw Alexander Esswein into the team.
For relatively little investment, you had a German Bundesliga striker with elite pace and enough strength to make catching him considerably less useful than you’d hoped.
He also belonged to a wonderful category of FIFA player: the card you bought while saving for somebody supposedly better, only to discover that you didn’t particularly want to replace him.
Why spend thousands upgrading your striker when the 75-rated bloke from Nürnberg had just scored four goals?
Sound financial management, really.
Esswein is a True OG FIFA Legend
This is probably why Esswein is still remembered.
Modern Ultimate Team has become increasingly centred around a constantly moving power curve of promotional cards, upgrades and special versions. Even within the FUT community, nostalgic discussions now regularly lament how difficult it is for ordinary low-rated gold cards to remain genuinely useful for long periods.
Older editions created a slightly different kind of cult hero.
Esswein wasn’t memorable because EA gave him a 94-rated promotional card celebrating an obscure weekend in November. He became memorable because the ordinary version was inexplicably brilliant.
FIFA 13 had plenty of these characters. Emmanuel Emenike became infamous for combining pace and power. Welliton terrorised defences. Emmanuel Mayuka was another cheap striker who performed well beyond expectations, while players such as Felipe Santana became essential because their particular attributes suited the game far better than their overall ratings suggested.
They became footballers you knew because of FIFA. As we do this FIFA legend, among many others.
For younger fans especially, that mattered. Ultimate Team sent people looking through leagues and clubs they might otherwise never have encountered, hunting for obscure combinations of pace, strength, skill moves and chemistry.
What Happened to Esswein in Real Life?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Esswein never became the unstoppable German forward FIFA 13 occasionally suggested he might.
He remained in German football, leaving Nürnberg for Augsburg in 2014 before later representing Hertha Berlin, Stuttgart and Sandhausen among others. It was a solid professional career rather than the beginnings of international superstardom.
His FIFA legacy, however, had already been secured.
FIFA 14 moved him to left midfield and reduced his overall rating to 71, although remarkably he retained 91 pace.
There would be later Esswein cards, but none recreated the peculiar magic of that FIFA 13 striker.
Sometimes you only get one year.
A Proper FIFA Cult Hero
Alexander Esswein’s FIFA 13 card represents an era of Ultimate Team that feels increasingly nostalgic now.
There was enormous satisfaction in finding a player for next to nothing, putting him into a cheap Bundesliga team and discovering that he could torment squads worth considerably more. You weren’t chasing the latest content release. You were trying to find the footballers whose attributes happened to make them brilliant at that particular version of FIFA.
Esswein was almost the perfect example.
He was only 75 rated. His shooting was supposedly average. Most casual football fans outside Germany probably had little idea who he was before FIFA 13.
None of that mattered once the through ball was played. If you know, you know.
Did you ever use Esswein on FIFA 13?