Jon Champion on life as cult hero Pro Evo commentator - 'I would tweak the more outlandish lines to make them more acceptable'

Right about now, millions of gamers around the world will be experiencing one of life’s great feelings.

You’ve made your excuses to get off work or school, you’ve shut the curtains, and are settling in for a day of pure, uninterrupted bliss playing the new Fifa game.

Having hung up my controller a few years ago, days like today always bring with them a pang of nostalgic envy.

A decade ago, I was enjoying that sensation as a student - though there were a few important differences. For a start back then it was Pro Evolution Soccer - known almost universally as Pro Evo - rather than Fifa that I, and the rest of my friends, was playing.

Fifa at the time had drifted into irrelevance, while Pro Evo - with its peerless gameplay and miraculous defence-splitting through balls - was dominant.

But unlike the polished Fifa games that dominate now (Petr Cech wearing a scrum cap for contract negotiations aside), Pro Evo in the mid to late-2000s was characterised by its quirks and idiosyncrasies.

Restrictions over licensing meant Pro Evo had to make up their own team names, so Aston Villa became West Midlands Village. Tottenham were North East London, and Bolton Wanderers slightly confusingly were Middlebrook. On earlier editions player names also had to be changed, leading to the famed Brazil team of Ravoldi, Facu and Roberto Larcos. 

Nowhere was Pro Evo’s unique charm more apparent than in the commentary, which was provided by Jon Champion - a well-respected veteran of BBC, ITV and ESPN.

Such was the game's popularity that Champion became a cult hero, developing a global following and the sobriquet "the Pro Evo commentator". 

To help me manage my Fifa-induced FOMO, Champion kindly indulged me in a wistful look back at his stint as football's computer game laureate. 

“People used to say that they liked Fifa for all the licensing and it was very slick, but they liked Pro Evo because it was more of a gamer’s game," says Champion. "And also they liked the eccentricities of the commentary.”

Of his cult-hero status, Champion, who worked on the game between 2007 and 2014, said: "I suddenly found that I had a very different audience - many of which still think that’s all I do."

When I suggest that through the game, millions of fans developed a weird intimacy with him, Champion admits: “I do hear that said.”

For those my sort of vintage, Champion's voice became synonymous with our student days. Particularly memorable were his off-key introductions to matches, which had a strange preoccupation with logistics.

“Ambulances on standby, health insurance policies have been checked, the physios are going to be really busy,” was one of my favourites.

Then there were musings on what the fans were up to: “A fascinating contest in store, but not fascinating enough for one or two spectators who have lingered by the bar.”

And sometimes he’d channel his inner Alex Ferguson: “As coaches so often say, treat the ball as a friend”.  

If all else failed, we would hear a screamed: “Possibility!”

Reflecting on these pearls of wisdom, Champion explains: “The vast majority of the Pro Evo lines were written by scriptwriters employed by the company that makes the game, Konami.

“However I would then tweak the more outlandish lines to make them more acceptable to an English-speaking audience.”

This does make you wonder: what on earth must the more outlandish ones have sounded like?

For Champion, confirmation of his his cult-hero status came during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, when he emerged in a Cape Town hotel bleary-eyed at around 3am and enjoyed his Beatles arriving at JFK moment.

“I got in, and all I wanted to do was check in to my room,” he recalls. “But I was met by a committee of four young guys in their twenties all very smartly dressed in their hotel uniform. It was the night manager plus three of his mates who had stayed up because they had seen my name on the list of people checking in and they’d wanted to meet the Pro Evolution Soccer commentator.

“It was all fine and I managed to stay awake long enough to talk to them and say thank you but they obviously had an eye for the main chance because just as I was about to take my key and go to my room, they rummaged beneath the reception desk and got out this box with 50 copies of Pro Evolution Soccer and wouldn’t let me go to my room until I’d signed all of them - presumably to be put on eBay.

“It has its moments, being the Pro Evo commentator.”

On the flip side, Champion was targeted by fans who believed he was biased against their team - as if he was commentating live on each match.

“It developed a life all of its own, and you get people contacting you on social media about things you’ve said on the game and accusing you of bias against a particular team,” he says.

“Some people almost believe that you’re sitting inside your computer speaking to them.

“In reality, you’ve laid down thousands, or tens of thousands, of lines for every eventuality and it’s down to computer programming by a Japanese company that decides what comes out at what particular moment.”

Sometimes the decisions made would be questionable. On PES 2008, Newcastle were one of the very few licensed teams on the game - prompting the immortal line: "There's no love lost between these two teams: Argentina and Newcastle United." 

Calls like these were of course out of Champion's hands - all he could do was ensure that every eventuality was covered. Doing so was a laborious process - though it's unclear if ambulances were on stand-by.

“You go into a studio in Soho for six, seven, eight days of recordings,” Champion says. “And on the first day you can’t see over the desk for the pile of paper that awaits you, which is the script.

“That’s the biggest mental challenge when you turn over page one and you look through this enormous pile and assuming it's not too heavy, you pick it up to see that the final page is number 897.

“You think ‘crikey, I’ll have to get through all of this’. When you first go in to do a game, you have to lay down everything, including thousands of team names and player names that you have to say with different intonations and intensities, and in various different circumstances.

“After a while I learned to space it out but in the early years I would do it day after day and that was tough. You’d come blinking out into the light at the end of the day, not quite sure what planet you were on.

“It could be close to 12-hour shifts, and that takes a great toll on your voice because there's a lot of shouting to be done. Your voice becomes conditioned to shouting for 90 minutes but not hours day after day.

“You have to be quite careful, and you rely on the producers and sound engineers to divvy up the work that needs to be done so you don’t have too much shouting to be done in one go. You need the rest of some low intensity work amongst all the shouting bits.”

At this point I confess that as a hungover student, I never appreciated the art and science that went into Champion’s commentary.  

Increasingly excited, Champion continues: “Then they have this thing called concatenation, which is how you bolt it all together to make it sound realistic.

“So if I record five versions of ‘Beckham’, and then [his voice rising with each example] ‘picks up the ball’, and then ‘runs at the defender’, and then ‘has a shot’, and then [builds to a crescendo] ‘scores!’

“It’s how you manage to make those five different elements into one seamless phase of commentary. So concatenation is what they work very hard to do to make sure that however you’ve said the player’s name it will match relatively seamlessly with what it needs to be bolted onto.”

Despite leaving Pro Evo three years ago, Champion retains a clear affection for the series, which has enjoyed a renaissance in the last few years.

We don’t yet know if it will be Fifa or Pro Evo who triumphs in the latest head to head, but as Champion so memorably once said: “It will end in disappointment for one party, and in a party for the other.”