I have 2 picks:
PES (yeah it was big in Latin America and Asia but never truly beat FIFA popularity worldwide except in the early 2000s), if I had to pick a specific version, is either PES 2010 or 2013, 2016 was also great.
FIFA street 1: Almost 2 decades later and still think it’s the best FIFA game ever, not even the street sequels were able to surpass it. FIFA 11 and 13 were good too but those aren’t underrated in any way.
Cyberball. Football, but with robots.
https://youtu.be/S_hdsVcr2-k
I liked Basewars on the NES. Wiki says it got a B- but I liked the fighting and the fact that you could blow up the robots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqB6rY94DCw
The arcade version of Cyberball has very clean gameplay with a wry sense of humour.
Side-by-side play is excellent on a Cyberball 2072 cabinet.
The spiritual predecessor, 10 Yard Fight, is pretty fun too(shake joystick to break tackles)
I love Ten Yard Fight. It’s like the dev team in Japan had one guy who “totally knows American football!” and he explained it to the rest of them while they were all out drinking, and then the next day they were provided with 5 minutes of footage from the Burt Reynolds version of The Longest Yard.
But all in the best way.