Free-to-play FIFA rival UFL already supported by Ronaldo

metro.co.uk:

A British firm is creating an alternative to FIFA and eFootball and they’ve signed up Cristiano Ronaldo to help promote it.

It’s incredibly difficult, if not outright impossible, to release a new football simulator when FIFA exists. Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer, now known as eFootball, used to be a worthy alternative but that’s become a sad shell of its former self.

Despite FIFA’s dominance, a new challenger has stepped onto the pitch. Called simply UFL (there’s no official explanation of what the name means but it’s probably Ultimate Football League), developer Strikerz recently held a reveal event to share a bunch of information about the game.

UFL is described as a free-to-play, fair-to-play experience, where the online matchmaking will ensure that players will only go up against those of a similar skill level.

Online play will obviously be the main focus, with both ranked and unranked modes, but Strikerz also confirmed offline play, 2v2 and 3v3 matches, and some unspecified special events.

Strikerz has already partnered with a number of clubs to include in the game, such as West Ham United, AS Monaco, and Sporting CP, with around 5,000 real-life players to form a team with.

This includes Portuguese player Cristiano Ronaldo who made an appearance during the event to promote the game and will likely be UFL’s cover star. Other ambassadors include Kevin de Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku, Roberto Firmino, and Oleksandr Zinchenko.

You can watch the full event yourself on YouTube, although most of its 18-minute runtime is spent on the team explaining the game’s development. There is some brief gameplay footage showing it in action, as well as some of the menus, which looks fairly encouraging.

While it hasn’t garnered as much attention as