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.
Edit: wow y’all old lol
In the arcades, NHL Open Ice, AKA 2 on 2 NHL Open Ice Challenge. The sport of hockey done by the same team behind NBA JAM, which sadly never received the Tournament Edition version - like NBA JAM did - that it always deserved. The source code for it, and several other arcade games from Midway, did eventually get leaked to Github, so my hopes of a hack that adds stuff or gives us updated rosters is still alive: https://github.com/historicalsource/open-ice