EA CEO goes in on FIFA: 'four letters on the front of the box'

pcgamer.com:

Last year EA announced it would look to re-brand the long-running FIFA series. Reports at the time suggested FIFA wanted too much money, EA executives were increasingly aware that the game is bigger than the license, and the cherry on the cake came when EA trademarked 'EA Sports FC'.

EA's current licensing deal with FIFA means that we will see a FIFA 23 later this year, but beyond that? Things are looking very dicey, and a new report by VGC quotes CEO Andrew Wilson's words from an internal meeting held in November last year—shortly after the news became public.

«I’m going to be more open… more open than I’ve been with the outside world,» Wilson said, «We’ve had a great relationship with FIFA over the past 30-odd years. We’ve created billions in value… it’s just huge. We’ve created one of the biggest entertainment properties on the planet. I would argue—and this may be a little biased—that the FIFA brand has more meaning as a video game than it does a governing body of soccer.»

Wilson went on to expand on this notion that FIFA the game is more important than FIFA the football governing body: «Basically, what we get from FIFA in a non-World Cup year is the four letters on the front of the box, in a world where most people don’t even see the box anymore because they buy the game digitally.»

That is what they call an executive-level burn.

One of Wilson's more eyebrow-raising assertions is that «Our players tell us they want more cultural and commercial brands relevant to them in their markets, more deeply embedded in the game… brands like Nike. But because FIFA has a relationship with Adidas, we are not able to do that.»

This obviously isn't about players of the game, whatever Wilson says, but about the footballers. They