Last year’s FIFA stormed out of the blocks when it released on September 29, topping UK sales charts and kicking Destiny 2 off its throne.
The game’s figures were helped by a slew of console bundles but helped create a huge gap between itself and PES.
During the same week PES 2018 failed to make it into the top 10.
Konami’s football simulator came in at 12th place after only releasing on September 12.
But this year PES is releasing earlier than usual with Adam Bhatti, the game’s international brand manager, insisting the move was made to coincide with the start of the new football season.
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He told IGN: “As a football fan, you really want to be able to start the season and actually get into it with the hype.
“For us it is important to have our own release window. It allows us to talk about us and it allows everyone to judge PES by itself.
“We wanted to give ourselves some space, give PES the opportunity to be judged for its own quality.”
But with PES changing its release date to seemingly escape FIFA’s inevitable dominance, we asked EA Sports Creative Director Matthew Prior whether the series could also move its schedule forward to coincide with new English football season.
Prior said such a move was “possible” in the future but emphasised EA is sticking to its release date of September 28 for FIFA 19.
He commented: “Yeah I think it is possible, it is not something we are looking at obviously this time around.
“We are coming out in September this time but PES it’s good to have competition, it’s good for the consumers to have competition.
“You know PES is a good game, you know FIFA is obviously a great game as well but how and when we ship is not so much of a dev team thing rather it’s more a business model.
“But it is absolutely something that could happen at some point, it is just not a decision that we would make primarily at the game team level.”
If EA moved the release date of the FIFA series forward to compete with PES, it could dramatically alter Konami’s sales figures.
Express.co.uk recently went hands-on with FIFA 19 and can confirm the newest instalment bring a host of notable features.
In addition to “50/50 Battles”, a new mechanic that drastically changes how players compete for the ball, EA has also stolen PES’ prized Champions League mode.
You can read Express.co.uk’s full preview of FIFA 19 here.