From Messi to Ronaldo, most of football’s greatest modern players have graced video game covers over the years. But which is the best? Well, there’s no real scientific way to decide this, so I’m pretty much going on aesthetic-based vibes completely. I’ve also pretty much stuck to the big two football series from the past few decades — FIFA/EA FC and Pro Evolution Soccer — but believe me, the temptation to stick the likes of Peter Beardsley’s International Football was certainly there. So, without further ado, let’s look at what I think are the 10 best football game covers.

Few people in the world, at least certainly in England, were as famous as David Beckham was in 1998. Part of a flourishing Manchester United team under Sir Alex Ferguson and one half of a superpower of a celebrity couple alongside the Spice Girls’ Victoria Beckham, he was an obvious choice to place on a video game cover if you wanted it to sell. A clean, white background image that features Beckham wearing number seven in the iconic England World Cup 98 kit, it looked like an even better decision by EA Sports after he curled in a free kick against Colombia in the group stages. Little did they know that his tournament would end in disaster thanks to a petulant red card against Argentina a week later. I wonder how many copies were sold after that.

FIFA 13 was the first year that saw the greatest player of all time, Lionel Messi, grace the cover of EA Sports' long-running series. Having wrestled back dominance from Pro Evolution Soccer by now, getting Messi at the peak of his powers as the poster child felt like the cherry on top of the resurgence. A lovely cover in which the Argentine’s red and blue Barcelona kit pops against the black and white backdrop, the stadium featured is, interestingly, Newcastle’s St James’ Park and not the Catalan club’s home, Camp Nou. That’s because, despite Barcelona’s most famous player being the cover star, EA had not managed to secure the license for the stadium, instead replacing it with the generic El Libertador.

The most OP player to ever exist in a football game, it was only natural that one day Adriano would find his way onto a Pro Evolution Soccer cover. The blue and black stripes of Inter work fantastically against the gold background, and you can tell by the determination on his face that he’s putting all of his legendary 99-shot power into that strike. Arguably the finest football simulation ever crafted, PES 6 featured different players alongside the Brazilian depending on where in the world you were. For example, seeing Bayern were licensed this time around, the German version saw Paraguayan striker Roque Santa Cruz stand tall, whereas the rest of Europe had to look at John Terry. Oh well.

What a beautiful man. Those long locks flowing behind him as he dazzled with the ball at his feet, slaloming through defenders as if they were poles on the side of an Alpine ski course, were some of my most formative football memories. David Ginola is featured here in the black and white stripes of Newcastle, but would soon transfer to Tottenham Hotspur, where he’d go on to win the Players’ and Writers’ footballer of the year awards for a wholly underwhelming side. Trust me, I was there. Another clean cover with the player placed front and centre, it’s a classic, and still holds up 30 years later.

The hipster's choice. Marco Reus won the public vote for who should be on the cover of FIFA 17, beating out Eden Hazard, Anthony Martial, and James Rodriguez, and what a great pick it turned out to be. The Borussia Dortmund legend in that famous kit looks incredibly slick on this one, with the yellow wall looming behind him. Nothing much more to say about this one, aside from the fact that it just looks lovely.

For many years, Rooney and Ronaldinho dominated the FIFA cover, with the former appearing on seven in a row between 06 and 12, and the latter featuring on nine in total if you include World Cup and Street spin-offs. Wayne’s debut was alongside the Brazilian Ballon d’Or winner, and stands out due to its dramatic high contrast image decorated in lashings of rain. It gives FIFA 06 a real individual feel to it compared to so many of the cleaner images against plain or monochrome backgrounds that we were used to at the time. Maybe they did go a little heavy on the exposure here, as it looks as if both players are only feet away from screaming into the sun, but it certainly made it stand out on the shelf.

That hair. Wow. Long before David Luiz or Marc Cucurella were at it, Carlos Valderrama was football’s curly king. The Colombian star donned the cover of International Superstar Soccer 98 (before the series later spun off into Pro Evolution Soccer) in North America, and I couldn’t have been any more jealous. In Europe, we got an angry-looking Paul Ince facing off against an intimidating Fabrizio Ravanelli in black and white, which is just far less appealing than the multicoloured allure of this Colombia kit and Carlos’ layers of neck and wrist accessories. Pure luxury.

No room for smiles here, just business. Three players at the peak of their powers crossed their arms and stared into our souls in 2002. Brazilian left-back and king of the banana shot, Roberto Carlos. All-action Dutch midfielder, Edgar Davis. And since disgraced Welsh winger, Ryan Giggs. It’s a strong lineup and one of the most enduring cover images of the series to date. If you were in North America, you just got Landon Donovan instead. Hardly a fair trade, is it?

One year later, EA Sports went with the triple threat approach again, but instead of being scowled at, we had three of the world’s best attackers sprinting towards us. Back in 2003, this image would have caused nightmares for any defender who would have liked nothing less than to have seen Juventus’ Alessandro Del Piero, Arsenal’s Thierry Henry, or Barcelona’s Ronaldinho running towards them with the ball. There’s a lovely balance to it. Great mix of superstars. And an eye-catching range of colours on those jerseys, too. It’s the very best FIFA has had to offer over the years, and a high the series is still chasing.

It was a bold move for Pro Evolution Soccer 3 not to feature a player on its cover, but it couldn’t have paid off any more as world-renowned referee Pierluigi Collina took centre stage. It was a curious choice for many reasons. Not only because the Italian official didn’t actually appear in the game itself, but referees weren’t even shown on the pitch at all until the following year’s edition. It’s since gone down in history as one of the most iconic football game covers, though, thanks to its sunset imagery pierced by those authoritative eyes, shiny bald head, and finished off with the man himself’s autograph. A classy touch from the big man.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.

Half-Life 3 may not be here yet, or ever arrive, for that matter, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t already plenty of incredible games from developer Valve Corporation to play. And now with the brand new Steam Machine console to experience them on, what better time to get stuck in? The custodian of Steam may not be anywhere near as prolific as it once was when it comes to actually making games, but it still has a ridiculously strong list to pick from – some of which are daily destinations for hundreds of thousands of players. But which are the best? Well, that’s exactly what we’ve tried to decide here as we take in the importance, endurance over time, and innovation each of these games has brought to the table over the past three decades. Here are the 10 best Valve games to play right now.

A blood-soaked homage to zombie action cinema as much as it is a revolutionary landmark piece of co-op game design, Left 4 Dead was unlike anything else when it arrived in 2008. Across its multiple four-player modes, tight gunplay and edge-of-your-seat encounter design, it dished up ultra-satisfying combat that left the undead decapitated, but bathed in a stunning sheen of filmic lighting and grain effects that George A Romero himself would be proud of. It’s a perfect example of the blend of artistry and technology that has driven some of the studio’s most valued creations.

Valve is a developer known for its innovation, and nowhere in Left 4 Dead is this seen more clearly than in its campaign “Director” — an AI that oversees the player experience, tailoring the flow of combat and the challenges it presents. It's this dynamic overlord that makes this zombie horde shooter so compelling, twisting each run against Boomers, Hunters, and the much-feared, screeching, Witches into ever-surprising gauntlets of survival that were hard to tear ourselves away from, even when knowing the horrors that lurked within them.

The story of Dota 2’s development is a curious one, and a tale too long for the mere couple of paragraphs I have here. Essentially a sequel to a fan-made mod of Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft 3 called Defence of the Ancients, Dota 2 was announced following designer IceFrog’s hiring by Valve to create a MOBA of their own after Blizzard passed on his services. With the resources of Gabe Newell’s empire fuelling it, a multiplayer online battle arena giant was born, as deep, intricate combat systems overlapped to form the basis of one of the biggest eSports games of all time.

It was a brave move back in 2010 to announce a direct competitor to the phenomenon that was League of Legends, but that gamble paid off almost immediately, as it topped Steam's concurrent player numbers with 330,000 users a whole month before its official release. Over fifteen years later, Dota 2 has more than proved its worth in the MOBA space and is still played fervently to this day by as passionate a fanbase as you’ll see anywhere in games.

Left 4 Dead 2 built on the already brilliant foundations of its predecessor, improving its co-op undead action in pretty much every way to continue Valve’s long history of sensational sequels. Across its five campaigns, new types of infected were introduced, each controlled and sent to hunt you by the improved AI Director 2.0, which now had power over the geography of the levels themselves, creating deadly, shifting labyrinths that tested the most hardened of Left 4 Dead enthusiasts.

Upping the ante in every facet, boycotts and concerns over the graphic nature of its violence couldn’t stop Left 4 Dead 2 as it far outsold its predecessor, taking both PC and Xbox 360 sales charts by storm. Many imitators would follow over the years — Warhammer: Vermintide, Back 4 Blood, and Deep Rock Galactic, to name a few — but none could ever truly rebottle the magic created within Valve’s walls with the Left 4 Dead series.

A little break from the list here to say we’re only allowing games that Valve has fully released, hence why the hugely popular Deadlock won’t be appearing. Remember: it barely has a Steam store page, never mind a “buy” button. That’s not to say that it isn’t already a fantastic game, though, with its combination of third-person shooter and MOBA mechanics proving a big hit on Steam during its multi-year, highly exclusive, invite-only early access period. Essentially taking what the studio learned from the successes of both Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2, Deadlock offers fantastic 6v6 combat that wouldn’t be out of place in a hero shooter, but transplants it into the corridor-like lane structure more commonly seen in online battle arenas. With 32 characters already available on its roster, and more yet being teased, it’s come a long way since its initial beginnings in the summer of 2024, with updates continuing to gear it up for that eventual full launch. If Valve’s history with bringing in enormous numbers of concurrent players into its online multiplayer games is anything to go by, it’s set to be yet another Steam sensation when that day comes.

Although its origins can be traced all the way back to a 1996 Quake mod, 2007’s Team Fortress 2 can largely be credited with the mainstream popularity of the hero shooter. Combining two of Valve’s greatest loves — turning mods into sequels and innovating new subgenres — one of the first “games as service” focused on tried and tested multiplayer shooter modes such as king of the hill and capture the flag, but injected them with a set of uniquely skilled and armed characters that made squadmates completely rethink how to approach each match.

In development for almost a decade, Team Fortress 2 made the successful transition from military shooter vaporware to Source engine success upon Valve’s acquisition of the project, thus turning it into a multiplayer mainstay for years on PC and console thanks to its inclusion in the best-selling Orange Box. It was that Valve coating of character and humour that really made TF2 stand out from the crowd, though, making each member of its roster a joy to play with and listen to. Its success would be eclipsed by the likes of Overwatch in the years after, but its legacy lives on as a pioneer of a subgenre that burned brightly in the 2010s.

Counter-Strike’s loop of objective-based, high-stakes battle is a simple concept for a shooter, but one that demands mastery. The pursuit of pinpoint accurate headshots and practically precognitive reactions has kept the series locked in as one of the most-played multiplayer games for the best part of two decades. Global Offensive is arguably the height of its success, despite initially arriving as an uncertain successor to the beloved CS: Source, drawing in near-unprecedented player numbers on Steam, as well as nurturing one of the biggest eSports scenes ever built.

Most of its nine modes tweak the 5v5, terrorist vs. counter terrorist formula to some extent, but none are more enduring than the pulsating plant and bomb defusal action of Competitive, which has gone on to inspire many other shooters since. Without CS: GO, there would be no Rainbow Six Siege, and there would be no Valorant. Although it’s since been replaced by the more advanced Counter-Strike 2, and its reputation has occasionally been tarnished by gambling scandals and its role in normalising microtransactions via weapon skins, many would argue that nothing has quite captured the magic of Global Offensive’s very best days. Yet another example of Valve seeking out a shooter subgenre to make their own, CS: GO remains one of the studio’s greatest achievements.

In 2008, Portal took Half-Life 2’s physics-enabled Source engine and asked the question: “What if guns weren’t used to cut down enemies, but instead to sharpen the mind?” The answer was a short-but-sweet masterclass in puzzle design that tasked you with manipulating space, mass, and momentum in a lab a thousand times more fun than any science classroom. All-seeing AI construct GLaDOS plays equal parts tutor and torturer within the walls of the Aperture Science headquarters in a tale that may borrow whole pages from the script of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but delivers it with a nod and a wink that has become synonymous with Valve storytelling.

What starts out as an adventure that tasks you with moving giant white cubes from one part of a room to another takes on a much more sinister tone as your handy portal gun opens up doors into the unknown. A sublime marriage of story and top-class puzzle design punctuated with pitch-black humour, Portal only left us wanting more of this world from Valve. Thankfully, they would deliver exactly that four years later.

It’s safe to say that, despite huge leaps in headset technology, VR has been massively underserved by triple-A developers. That’s one of the reasons why Half-Life: Alyx is so notable; stepping into its newly rendered version of City 17 genuinely feels like slipping into a new reality, so detailed are its props, rooms, and streets. It’s the kind of trick only a studio like Valve could pull, pumping untold millions into an incredibly niche experience.

That budget doesn’t mean this prequel to Half-Life 2, in which you play as Alyx Vance, is as innovative as many of Valve’s other games – it’s primarily focused on adapting existing FPS ideas for VR, which it does with an unrivalled level of success. But that budget does mean that Half-Life: Alyx is by far and away the most immersive game in the series; you’ve not known fear until you’ve bumped into a headcrab zombie in virtual reality, or hidden in a storecupboard from a stalking beast, hands literally cupping your mouth to muffle your panicked breath. Combine all that with a campaign that feels perfectly structured for VR, both in terms of pacing and level design, plus a truly astonishing final act, and you’ve got what is undoubtedly the most unforgettable Half-Life game, even if it’s not the series’ lofty highpoint.

Of course, a huge question here is, where is Half-Life 3? It’s one that’s been bouncing around the internet ever since credits rolled on the shooter’s most recent chapter, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, back in 2007. Well, over two decades later, it’s one that still hasn’t been answered. During that time, of course, the episodic gaming experiment imploded, bringing an early end to the planned trio of Half-Life 2 expansions and initiating a 13-year wait for the VR-only Half-Life: Alyx. That long-awaited return (as well as its massive tease of an ending) has given us hope for Gordon Freeman to return one day. Over the past few months, rumours have been bubbling with a little more ferocity than usual, though, with multiple whispers flying around of a potential imminent reveal. With a new, console-like Steam Machine PC on the way from Valve, surely the best way to launch it would be with a brand-new, shiny Half-Life 3 to play on it? We live in hope.

A permanent fixture on the Mt. Rushmore of first-person shooters, Valve’s 1998 debut remains one of the greatest and most significant video games of all time. While its innovations in environmentally driven storytelling are now merely chapters in a history book, and its blocky characters, relentless load screens, and awkward “long jump” erode some of its magic in the eyes of modern gamers, Half-Life’s uneasy atmosphere, incredible level design, and tense combat encounters render it immortal.

The 21st century’s best FPS campaigns have all learned from Valve’s immaculate construction, which builds each new chapter and environment around unique concepts. There’s the hide-and-seek attack on the Tentacles in 'Blast Pit', the bombardment of laser-guided rockets in 'Surface Tension', and, later, the solving of portal puzzles in 'Lambda Core'. The story undulates between frantic, bloody gunfights, terrifying horror sequences, and extended moments of exploration and discovery – a trio of flavours that are perfectly balanced. And while it all culminates in the misstep that is Xen, a mushy alien planet that fails to offer the precision engineering of the Black Mesa Research Facility’s sharp corridors, there’s no denying that Half-Life is still, in many ways, a guiding light for the genre.

Speaking of the 21st century’s best FPS campaigns, there’s still a very valid argument that nothing has bettered Half-Life 2 since its release over 20 years ago. Gordon Freeman’s transition from scientist to resistance fighter following an alien invasion on Earth sets the stage for some of gaming’s most memorable moments, all the way from its influential stage-setting opening to its full-blown descent into horror through the undead streets of Ravenholm. But even outside its fantastic story, Half-Life 2 impresses on every level, acting as a showcase for Valve’s Source engine by introducing next-level physics simulations that remain impressive to this day.

All roads lead to the Gravity Gun, perhaps Valve’s signature harmonic combination of innovative tech and gameplay. One of video games’ most iconic weapons, it turns set dressing into offensive and defensive tools, allowing you to catch and hurl back grenades, hold boxes high as shields, and send swirling saw blades spinning through the air to decapitate oncoming headcrab zombies. It’s a genius piece of gameplay design inside a genius piece of campaign design, and remains one of Valve’s crowning achievements.

The original Portal was a near-perfect first draft, but limited by its relatively small ambitions. Its 2011 sequel, Portal 2, smashed expectations and expanded upon every idea introduced in 2007, delivering an intricately designed, story-led puzzle adventure that is somehow even closer to perfection. Revisiting an abandoned Aperture Sciences many years after the events of the first game gives Portal 2 an instantly eerier feel, but offsets that with a level of charm and humour not often seen in games. A lot of credit for that can be given to the writing and performance behind the player’s robot guide, Wheatley. British comedian Stephen Merchant’s delivery is spot-on as a friendlier AI to counterbalance the remaining GLaDOS threat that digitally stalks the lab.

It’s a tale whose twists and turns shift in tone as much as the geography you manipulate with the series’ signature portal gun. Much like the story’s scope, the challenge each puzzle room poses is expanded greatly in the sequel, with huge spaces having to be navigated through doors of your design, and Valve once again magically turning complex physics lessons into the purest of fun. It’s now been 15 years since Portal 2, and, sadly, we’re yet to play another. Still, it remains the developer’s finest combination of innovative campaign design and compelling story to this day, and as such, is Valve’s greatest game.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.