“You want to play FIFA after school?”
A familiar sound across classrooms worldwide. Thirty years of the interactive football franchise published by EA Sports, from the SEGA Mega Drive to the PS5. A bestseller at every single annual release. Gone. Done. End of an era.
FIFA is easy to say, it rolls off the tongue. The game is almost entirely detached from its namesake at this point. I’m sure there are avid FIFA players out there that don’t know that FIFA is in charge of football, who Gianni Infantino is, or why the name of their favorite game is changing.
Because we’re all going to keep calling it FIFA for a while, aren’t we?
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“It wouldn’t surprise me, yes, that in the short term, there’s still a little bit of overhang with the amazing experiences delivered in the past,” admits David Jackson, VP of Brand at EA Sports. We sat down together in a cool London hotel, with the new branding in monochrome behind him, to talk about the future of the game and his love of football.
EA Sports want us to be talking about FC, now. Same game, new jersey. The rebrand launched over Easter weekend in a coordinated social media deluge, along with pitchside branding at fixtures across Europe.
“To see it come to life in the world of football, and have it be showcased through the lens of hundreds and hundreds of our partners all over the world. All the way from La Liga and Real Madrid, all the way through to League Two here in England, so the rebrand means the world to us,” Jackson beams.
This drip-feeding of the game which we won’t see until September feels early. FIFA 23 is still live, and still has content to come, including its annual ‘Team of the Season’ promotion in FIFA Ultimate Team. The rumor mill feels like it has started early this year, for a title which we won’t get any info on until July. But as the soccer season heads towards a climax in both league and continental competitions, it seems EA knew this was the time to stick its new flag in the ground.
“The brand and its identity and vision went live through the lens of football – that’s where it lives most strongly,” he responds, putting my thoughts about FIFA 23 being abandoned early to bed.
“We know we have a responsibility to make sure that there’s no confusion in the space around what was a FIFA product and what that will look like in the future… We also know that we exist in the context of global football, and the seasons at the moment in some of the major leagues are really heating up.”
All this, it turns out, has been the plan for a long time. We’ve known the new name for a little while now. It started with a trademark filed in the UK in October 2021, spotted by VGC, and behind the scenes, EA Sports had been planning for the breakup for much, much longer.
“[We’ve been planning for] a number of years now, working to ensure that we had our own platform and our own brand that we could invest deeply and on behalf of our players,” Jackson says.
Aside from the obvious – money and politics between EA and soccer’s governing body – I was curious to know why they’ve been planning this move, and what this independence had Jackson so stoked.
“It’s the freedom for us to be able to consider anything that we want to do in the future and not have it be limited or curtailed by any third party,” he says.
“This brand is ours and ours alone, to build on behalf of partners and players all over the world.”
Jackson is very relaxed when I ask him if he is fussed about people continuing to call his game FIFA. It’s a game I’ve played since 2002, and it’ll be hard for me to make the change.
“We think over time people will call the platform FC,” he says. “Then, via osmosis over time, it’ll become very obvious that this is an FC product. Or this is an FC experience and it comes from EA Sports.”
The new brand identity is centered around triangles, a shape the EA Sports press release describes as ‘a dominant shape in [soccer] culture that represents the sport in multiple dimensions’. As a representation of the player indicator symbol that appears above every athlete in every match, it makes the most sense to me. The response online has been divided. For the majority of the 150m users, it probably makes no difference. Jackson, however, doesn’t want apathy.
“We’ve heard some really positive reactions to the visual identity, and we’ve equally heard some challenging feedback as well,” he says. “That’s okay. What we didn’t want is any middle-of-the-road sort of easy-to-ignore feedback.
“There’s at least something memorable in the identity that we’re looking to deliver and all of that feedback is really welcome.”
With this newfound freedom from third-party shackles, EA Sports is confident that it can continue to play a part in soccer culture around the world, and blur the line between reality and video games. Over 19,000 fully licensed players, 700+ teams and 30+ leagues will be present in the first EA SPORTS FC title. Jackson’s team has built relationships with 300 global football partners, including UEFA, that will allow further expansion into areas including both women’s and grassroots soccer.
That starts with FC Futures, a charitable initiative that is investing $10 million into the grassroots game, in real life.
FC Futures launched its first project at a primary school in South London, the ‘Rocky and Wrighty Arena’, where Arsenal and England icon Ian Wright went to school. Wright is the first ambassador for FC Futures, along with Emma Hayes, the manager of Chelsea Women.
That, Jackson says, is just part of the project. “We’re going to democratize a library of practices through the lens of the [game] engine where coaches can go online and download those practices and be able to use them in their plans.
“The final thing is technical packs, where people will get access to cones and bibs and balls to be able to use on the pitches that we build, so that we can really actively reinvest in the real world of football.”
Cynics will say this is guilt money for dragging people away from the pitch and in front of screens playing football, but the love of the game – regardless of where or how it is played – really shines through in Jackson’s words.
“So some research that we did sort of neuters or counters maybe a perception that our game detract from people playing football in the real world, we found that 63% of people, if they play our game, are disproportionately more likely to play football in the real world,” Jackson explains.
“It’s super, super important for our teams and our partners to know that we are investing in young people’s access to the world of real football and their fandom of the sport. And it’s really genuinely important to me as well.”
And for Jackson, a father living in Canada and a big Everton fan, it’s personal, too.
“I have three young kids, I see what it’s like when you do have access [to quality facilities to play] in Canada and where you don’t, in previous places we’ve lived,” he says. “It’s night and day in terms of their love for the sport once they can play and once they can play with facilities that are adequate for you know their needs.”
EA SPORTS FC is expected to launch in September 2023.
Written by Alex Bugg on behalf of GLHF.