I am planning to build a simple 2D game similar in complexity to the 1 vs. 1 Soccer game. I am very comfortable working with HTML and CSS, and fairly comfortable with Javascript.
Would I be better off building the game directly in Phaser or should I use a tool like Phaser Editor?
I recommend you to learn Phaser with any of the tutorials available on the Phaser site and later try with Phaser Editor 2D. It is free for projects with less than 70 files.
I invite you to the Phaser Editor 2D discord channel: Phaser Editor 2D