EA Sports releases a new game under a new name this month, following the end of a 30-year partnership with FIFA. From Sol Campbell to Avril Lavigne and a Polish MMA fighter, it’s an era that’ll live long in the memory
Thirty years on, Tom Stone remembers the conversations at EA Sports ahead of them launching the very first edition of FIFA. It’s hard to believe today that there was ever any doubt the world’s most renowned video game organisation would make a success out of football. Back in 1993, though, before the birth of the Xbox or PlayStation, there was plenty of cynicism among EA’s top brass. “The Americans just didn’t get it,” reveals Stone, who was appointed as the company’s vice-president of European marketing that year. “They were like, ‘Soccer? What is that?’ They asked how many units this game was going to sell; they said football wasn’t very popular. We countered, ‘Actually, it really is’.”
In the end, even EA’s European division, who had argued the case for the creation of a football game, couldn’t have foreseen how colossal their idea would become. As much as Stone and his colleagues were consciously seeking an “evergreen franchise” that would deliver big returns each year, just as Madden NFL was doing in North America, what followed was nothing short of a global sensation. After the game’s maiden iteration, FIFA International Soccer, released on Sega Mega Drive in December 1993, the series sold in excess of 330 million copies and became the best-selling sports video game franchise of all time. And it nearly didn’t see the light of day. SEND FOR TONY GUBBA “It was kind of a little play with soccer in the US, as the World Cup was being held over there in 1994,” explains Lee Price, the author of FIFA Football: The Story Behind The Video Game Sensation, when FFT asks about that first Mega Drive release 30 years ago. “But there was little resource and frankly limited interest, and the game was very close to not being finished on time. “They thought, ‘Let’s get it out and forget about it’, and sleepwalked into a cultural phenomenon. It became so big, they had to make another one, then another one. In time, it overtook Madden and proved the title that, worldwide, everyone wanted to play. It wasn’t an accidental success, but it wasn’t a million miles off that.” The idea of a football game had first been suggested to EA in late 1991, after senior executive Mark Lewis identified a gap in the market. At the time, early ’90s cult classic Sensible Soccer was yet to hit the shops, and while Match Day, Kick Off and Emlyn Hughes International Soccer had earned some fans, no football game thus far been a huge hit. Despite the case Lewis put forward, EA’s US division were sceptical and felt football was too tricky to replicate. They weren’t entirely wrong: the technology of the period made for one-dimensional gameplay that struggled to provide authenticity. Most football games were fairly formulaic and rigid, lacking the fluidity of the real thing. But the team of developers and business brains working on the game’s concept had hatched a plan to stand out from the crowd. Gameplay would be improved by breaking the tradition of the era, shunning a bird’s eye view and creating an angled shot from the corner of the stadium to show more of the pitch and make players seem 3D. “Madden had a similar 45-degree view and that was one of the two things that allowed FIFA to break through,” Stone tells FFT. “The other was the licensing strategy we pursued: signing up FIFA as a partner.” The 1993 debut bore FIFA’s name but didn’t include real-life players, clubs nor domestic leagues. It was a purely international affair, fake-named identikit players padding out the squads of 48 national teams worldwide, including the powerhouses of Luxembourg, Iraq and Hong Kong
Tony Gubba recorded commentary for the PC CD-ROM version, although it was on the Mega Drive that the game really took off – EA’s target of selling 300,000 copies across Europe, which was considered ambitious, was smashed within weeks in the UK alone. More than half a million units were flogged in the first four weeks of release in Britain, with FIFA International Soccer remaining at the top of gaming charts deep into 1994. Work to make the second version of the game even better was well underway. One of Stone’s jobs was to secure licensing deals from all over the world, to allow FIFA 95 to feature the major clubs. A year later, FIFA 96 included the real player names, too. “EA Sports’ slogan was, ‘If it’s in the game, it’s in the game’,” says Stone. “That led to me getting a plane with two other people, flying around the globe to sign up every league we could. We had a relationship with FIFA, but the last two letters of their name were an
indication of what rights they actually had: f**k all. They had nothing, so we helped to organise and make leagues realise they had rights – rights to stadiums, players, player likenesses, apparel and league structure. “I flew to Italy, Spain, France and Denmark. We did MLS in North America as well as the J.League in Japan. What made FIFA garner admirers was that it ended up being a very compelling game experience.” Quickly, the marketplace was also filling up with a host of other football titles, but the credibility provided by naming rights meant that EA Sports’ offering stole the attention – even if other rivals had edged ahead of FIFA in the gameplay stakes. “EA SPORTS DISCOVERED AVRIL LAVIGNE” Despite that early success, the relationship between EA Sports and football’s governing body wasn’t always smooth. The value of
FIFA’s endorsement certainly hadn’t gone unnoticed; no partnership was sacred if there was potential for a better deal elsewhere. “It was awkward because the only thing they wanted to talk about was, ‘How much money are you going to give us?’,” reflects Stone. “There was little discussion about building a long-term partnership, which is what I was keen to establish from a commercial point of view. “We didn’t know how successful the game was going to become, but we had a sense that this thing could be pretty cool. Our position was that we wanted to be a good long-term partner with FIFA, but they never responded. “I once said it was like dating a girl you feel is wonderful, but you think, ‘She isn’t saying very much and I’m not sure where I stand’. I did find out, though,
because in 1996 I got a call from someone at Sony who said, ‘You and I need to speak’. I met him and he explained, ‘FIFA are out shopping the licence’. He told me FIFA had approached Sony and asked them if they’d be interested in taking the rights exclusively.” Potential disaster was averted, before EA Sports cemented their relationship with the release of FIFA: Road to World Cup 98, an enduring cult classic that featured David Beckham on the cover in the UK. Whereas the French version starred David Ginola, who didn’t even make it to the World Cup, a fine tournament surely lay ahead for Becks; what could possibly go wrong? With Paolo Maldini and Raul picked to headline in Italy and Spain respectively, it was one of the first examples of EA’s new strategy to produce a series of localised covers targeted at different regions. Prior to that, the first cover shots captured in-match action, spawning several unlikely protagonists. For FIFA 93, Polish journeyman Piotr Swierczewski made an appearance on the cover alongside England star David Platt, using a picture taken from a 1994 World Cup qualifier at Wembley. A year later it was Spurs’ Norwegian shot-stopper, Erik Thorstvedt, leaping to make a save. Then, most bizarrely of all, Notts County’s long-throw master Andy Legg featured on the cover of FIFA 96, attempting to perform a slide tackle on Brescia midfielder Ioan Sabau in the Anglo-Italian Cup final. The Welshman was apparently more appealing than one of Sabau’s team-mates in that tie, USA 94 icon Gheorghe Hagi...
The agreements put in place were much simpler than those necessary to get today’s megastars signed up, though the reputation FIFA gathered in those early years helped to grease the gears of those discussions. “From the late 2000s, there was more of a negotiation with players, but by then FIFA was such a behemoth that it was an honour to be on the cover,” says author Price. “You see players debating their stats on the game and checking their likeness, but even if being on the cover wasn’t quite the Ballon d’Or, it was one of the ultimate achievements as a footballer to say that you’d made it. What a power that is for a video game.” It wasn’t just about on-pitch stars, either. Over the years, getting on the FIFA playlist became a significant fillip for musicians of all statuses, and was credited with elevating the careers of several artists. Songs became synonymous with individual editions of the game, and the mere mention of particular tracks was enough to automatically transport some fanatics to a specific year mostly spent pummelling controllers. “If you think back to FIFA 98 and listening to Blur’s Song 2 on repeat, I loved that song because of FIFA, and there are many people who say the same about a different song,” reminisces Price. “One of my favourite stories was that EA Sports basically discovered Avril Lavigne. One of her very first gigs was in EA’s canteen, attempting to impress the music guy they’d hired, because they realised that having a soundtrack elevated the authenticity and feeling of the game. They agreed a deal to put Lavigne’s debut single, Complicated, into FIFA 2003.”
Bagging Song 2 was a bit more unconventional. “Sean Ratcliffe, who became head of EA Sports Europe, phoned Blur just as they were about to go on stage in Australia,” recounts Stone of the FIFA 98 agreement. “Sean said to them, ‘We want Song 2 – what can we give you?’ and I think it was Damon Albarn who replied, ‘We’ve got more money than we know what to do with, but what we can’t get is tickets to the World Cup final’. We knew how to get them, so we secured four tickets for the 1998 World Cup Final and the deal was done. “We also had this relationship with Robbie Wiliams for FIFA 2000, which all came about when he was interviewed on his exit from the Brit Awards after winning everything. He was asked, ‘What are you going to do now?’ and he said, ‘I’m going to go home and play FIFA 99’. So, literally the next morning, I called his management and queried, ‘Is that true?’. They confirmed that it was, so I suggested we meet up and discuss a relationship.” Williams did more than lend them an old hit: he wrote FIFA 2000’s theme song and then released it as a single as the game hit the shelves, with It’s Only Us reaching No.1 as a double A-side with She’s The One. In exchange, his beloved Port Vale were included in the game. RONALDO AT SUGARLOAF MOUNTAIN FIFA had the star quality, but it didn’t guarantee the game’s position as the number one football sim. A contender to that crown came in the form of Pro Evolution Soccer, produced by Japanese development company Konami. PES – or Pro Evo, as many preferred to call it – couldn’t come close to rivalling FIFA for its licensing, yet it’s affectionately remembered for team names like Merseyside Red for Liverpool, and players such as Roberto Larcos instead of Roberto Carlos. And, vitally, its gameplay was deemed to have the edge on FIFA. “PES felt like football, while FIFA felt a bit kick-and-run back then,” says Steve Merrett, who ran PR for PES in the UK between 2002 and 2019. “FIFA was very lightweight at the time and PES had physicality to it – it was a slower game, but that made it feel more precise and tactical. There were also little things, like the way players received the ball. In the early games, when you had Beckham and Paul Gascoigne in it, there was a slight difference to the way they played, whereas FIFA players were identikit.” Konami weren’t the only ones to notice. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but during lunchtimes when we were on a break, we wouldn’t play FIFA – we’d play PES instead,” confesses Stone. “You have to acknowledge it, otherwise you’re not dealing with reality, and the reality was that PES was a brilliant game. We had to pull our socks up and say, ‘What can we learn from this?’” In its heyday, PES was consistently selling between seven and nine-and-a-half million copies for each edition and it developed an enormous following, particularly in the UK. However, while PES did add a smattering of officially licensed clubs, stadiums and competitions along the way, the pressure to offer gameplay that FIFA couldn’t was too much to maintain. “PES’ glory days were overseen by a guy called Seabass Takatsuka and he was the man who took it from PlayStation to PlayStation 2, but he left around the time it went to PlayStation 3,” continues Merrett. “PlayStation 3 was an awful time for PES. They brought in this brand new development team that said they were going for more realism, but they were actually going for realism of faces. “Around the time of PES 2007, it became this tedious game where all of the midfield nuance and individuality was taken out in place of pace. That drop in quality coincided with FIFA doing what Konami had previously been doing, so it was almost as though they swapped ethos.” Opposition finally vanquished, EA Sports continued to develop FIFA. They always liked to dabble with new features, like the foul or chase-the-ref buttons and an indoor football mode in the ’90s. Advances in technology accelerated innovation. They toyed with a spin-off,
FIFA Street, in 2005 before rebooting it to greater success in 2012; brought in FIFA’s Player Career mode, where you could play as one individual; and added another dimension with The Journey, an immersive story mode focused on a fictional youngster named Alex Hunter and packed full of cameos. EA’s piece de resistance then landed with the creation of FIFA Ultimate Team, in which gamers collected packs of players to build a world-beating team from scratch. Ultimate Team revolutionised the gaming experience, becoming a cash cow for FIFA with in-game purchases and introduction of a new fantasy football aspect. The advent of superfast broadband all over the world also mushroomed the online play modes, as Ultimate Team became the perfect environment for players to test their prowess against others around the globe. It proved the mode of choice for the booming market
of professional FIFA events, with football clubs recruiting gamers to represent them in lucrative competitions. Prize money started to run into six figures for the biggest tournaments, streamed by millions of eSports fans and even broadcast on television by Sky. It quickly turned into big business, and while there were tales of casual FIFA players upsetting the order by beating pros at top events, elite online competition became principally the realm of well-backed teams boasting full-time players. It was different when David Bytheway was plucked from his bedroom in Wolverhampton to play FIFA on the grandest stage. It wasn’t just EA who saw the opportunity; even FIFA’s grey-haired bigwigs rolled out the red carpet. “I went to the 2014 Interactive World Cup that was hosted in Brazil,” reflects Bytheway, who later joined Wolfsburg as the first British FIFA player to sign for a professional club. “It was the top-tier event and the one that everyone wanted to make – the experience was amazing. Me and a friend flew out to Rio and landed at 6am, but we couldn’t go to bed because the FIFA reps said there was filming to do on Copacabana beach. That night, we were taken to a rooftop bar above the beach when all of a sudden, the crew of Match of the Day came in. We turn around and Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer and the lot of them are walking towards us. “The final was staged on top of Sugarloaf Mountain and the Brazilian Ronaldo turned up; he came to shake my hand before the final and wish me good luck. It was insane.” THE KING IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE KING Now, after three decades, the relationship between FIFA and EA Sports is over. Instead, EA are releasing a game under the name of EA Sports FC 24 this autumn, after the two parties announced a split following FIFA 23, unable to agree a new deal to extend their union due to a breakdown in negotiations. The new brand retains all of the gameplay and licences of EA’s previous football games, but without the recognisable FIFA name. The governing body intends to launch a game of its own next year to rival EA. Stone tells FFT, “I’m so proud of my former colleagues from EA who said to FIFA, ‘Our game is bigger than you, and while we would love to work with you, the rights exist in the local leagues’. FIFA are now back in 1993, where they have no rights to anything apart from the World Cup.” While EA Sports’ game will broadly stay the same, the divorce brought the curtain down on one of football’s most famous alliances, ending an era that played such a big part in so many people’s lives. It’s an era that may not have happened at all, had EA’s sceptical suits not been persuaded some 30 years ago. “Soccer? What is that?”
