What would happen if Electronic Arts and Take-Two Interactive decided to copy Nintendo's idea, and host World Championships for Madden NFL 15 and NBA 2K15 at E3 this week? Given how both games are currently built, these tournaments would likely become a long series of dull "mirror matches," repeatedly pitting Seahawks against Seahawks, and Warriors versus Warriors. Picking a team other than those two front-runners would be as big a handicap in those games as choosing to hit from the Pros' tees in Rory McIlroy PGA Tour, while all of your competitors are driving off the Women's tees.

Being able to gain a significant advantage over your opponent on the "team select" screen is partially sports videogames' fault, but primarily, professional sports' fault. League bigwigs love to talk-up their competition committees, and how they've helped to usher-in an era of "unprecedented parity," but that utopian, egalitarian vision hasn't yet materialized in sports videogames, which remain ruled by the one annoying "super squad" that everyone selects online. FIFA and PES still have FC Barcelona, NHL still has the Chicago Blackhawks, MLB The Show still has the Los Angeles Dodgers, and so on, as you browse through all of the team sports titles presently available on store shelves.

If sports videogames ever want to become serious, competitive eSports, on par with DotA, Counter-Strike, or Street Fighter, they will have to be completely rebalanced, in a way that equalizes each team's talent level, while still allowing for enough asymmetry to keep the matchups interesting. In other words, they will need to be balanced like a well-built fighting game.
 

On SEGA's Dreamcast, the original NFL 2K and NBA 2K tried achieving total team parity by implementing “Performance EQ,” a setting that gave every player on the field identical attribute ratings. This seemed like a great idea the first time that you switched it on, but unfortunately, all it did was create a boring clone war, as the teams became simple "palette swaps," to use fighting game terminology. Visual Concepts would invent a much better system for balancing teams' talent in the company's pigskin finale, All-Pro Football 2K8. That game's Olympic-sized pool of athletes was split into “gold,” “silver,” and “bronze,” tiers, which is the same player-ranking method that's used in modern Ultimate Team modes.

But whereas Ultimate Team is designed to keep users spending -- with no salary cap in place, and a steady drip-feed of increasingly superhuman players being released throughout a sport's season -- All-Pro Football 2K8 was merely designed to keep users scheming. The game made all 248 of its gridiron greats available on day one, without making fans wait months for most of its roster to be released, and without leading gamers along some silly card-collecting quest to "catch 'em all." In All-Pro Football 2K8, you instantly had access to them all; you just couldn't deploy them all at once, so you had to figure out which athletes could mesh together to form the best team.
 

All-Pro Football 2K8's roster restrictions of two "golds," three "silvers," and six "bronzes" guaranteed that every team would have at least one exploitable weakness, in addition to several strengths. This made online matches much more varied and strategic -- two areas where Ultimate Team and its ilk are severely lacking. Who needs strategy, anyway, when your five options on the floor are Jordan, LeBron, Durant, Bird, and Olajuwon? Just throw up a fadeaway, or turbo into to the lane for a slam dunk, and favorable results are sure to follow!

No Ultimate Team/My Team mode has implemented a tier-based restriction system yet, primarily, because these modes exist to sap money from impatient players' bank accounts. You could describe these online economies as virtual casinos, except that their clientele is predominantly children, and their "payouts" have no legitimate cash value. But if "superfans" (as they're politely called in public) want to keep spending real money for fake items, fine. I'm not suggesting that companies sacrifice their golden goose, and end people's obsessive pursuit of 99-overall "super teams." Like Nintendo's newest Super Smash Bros., Ultimate Team/My Team modes just need to offer separate matchmaking rules for "fun" and for "glory":
 

Ultimately, corporations' tireless pursuit of profit will probably prevent sports videogames from heading down this path, just as it has kept college football's crappy bowl system alive for decades, and it continues to keep North Carolina's men's basketball team free of sanctions. Until the ghouls of greed are finally defeated by the spirit of competition, sports fans should expect to see Heroes of the Storm's Lost Vikings, not Madden's Minnesota Vikings, airing on ESPN2.