Game changers: How EA Sports made a video game the epicenter of soccer culture

In the gamer parlance, what would become the biggest sports video game franchise of all time began as a side quest. Really, it was an accident. An idea that faced endless internal skepticism but became the core product of a company that went on to dominate a new industry. By the early 1990s, Electronic Arts had followed the success of John Madden Football by developing games in the other major American sports. Then, it wondered what sport it might tackle next. EA had been making games only since 1983 and had a habit of churning out lots of them -- 10 of them in that first year, seven in 1984 and 13 in 1985 -- to see what might stick. An idea came from the small team based in the company's London office: What about a soccer game? The idea had potential, the proposal promised, projecting lofty sales numbers. Other soccer games, Sensible Soccer and Kick Off, were popular but had hardly cornered the market. Soccer was the world's favorite sport -- it could take EA global, and there was a FIFA World Cup coming to the United States in 1994. Still, headquarters was hardly enthused. The idea faced a lot of opposition and deep concerns that it might not make money. The United States didn't even have a professional outdoor soccer league. "It was like the world's worst time to go to a North American company and say, 'Let's make a soccer game,'" said Marc Aubanel, then a developer at EA. "Because the sport had essentially failed." The game still got the green light. Some English contractors made a prototype, and then development of the game was assigned to a tiny team in Vancouver, British Columbia, with an even smaller budget. It was an afterthought, a long shot unlikely to pay out. And it seemed as though whenever the company looked to cut costs, the soccer game might get killed off. But it survived several culls. "It was a passion project, for sure," said John Santamaria, a tester on the first version of the game. But it was made by a team of true believers willing to take on this thankless task. "We wanted to be on that project. We gave a lot of ourselves on that project. We loved it. It was our baby. We worked hard to make that happen. "It certainly came with stress. It came with long hours. It came with the insecurity of not knowing, quarter to quarter, if we were going to be funded. It was a side-of-your-desk kind of project, but we were committed." A team of 16 got to work; the group was given little money but faced almost zero expectations. This would surely be a one-off assignment before they would all move on to some other game. "You have to understand," said Aubanel, who wound up working on the game, "there was not a sense back then that there was such a thing as a franchise -- that a game could last forever." Weston McKennie didn't watch a lot of soccer growing up. He still doesn't, even though he played the most minutes of any Juventus midfielder last season and the most of anyone on the U.S. men's national team at the World Cup. He learned the game by playing FIFA and then, after the game was renamed in 2023, EAFC. A noted extrovert, McKennie enjoyed the social aspect of it from the time he started playing at age 7 or so. "You'd have all your friends come over," he said. "You'd have tournaments where you've got to do dumb challenges because if you lose, you've got to do something." "Something" would be standing in goal on the little field in Weston's backyard, bare-chested with your back turned to your friends, who all get a free shot. By the time McKennie was a resident at the U.S. under-17 national team academy in Bradenton, Florida, they played for snacks, sandwiches, their per diem money. "Playing [FIFA] gave me more knowledge about players, for sure," McKennie said. "Knowing team names and player names and what positions they play and what foot they are, I learned more of that through the game." Landon Donovan once said much the same thing on his podcast with Tim Howard, "Unfiltered Soccer": "[FIFA] is how I learned about soccer players [growing up]. I couldn't watch on TV; we didn't have TV." The game's development team has since grown from 16 to more than 1,500, scattered in offices all over the world, who have created more than 30 titles (not including World Cup editions) in the series. The game includes some 200,000 real-life players on 750 clubs and national teams, playing in 120 stadiums and 35 leagues. All those players are meticulously rated by about 250 data editors and 8,000 volunteer reviewers. The franchise has always made it a point to be the go-to game for realism. "When you have that kind of licensing breadth in one place, it becomes very, very powerful," said Jeff Sharma, EAFC's vice president of brand. "We speak of ourselves as the trusted home of football. The mission overall is to grow the love of sports, and authenticity has been one of the biggest hallmarks of that." The game has burrowed so deeply into the sport, while gaming technology has progressed from giant pixels as blocky players to near-perfect digital lookalikes, that its presentation now feels fairly indistinguishable from the real broadcasts. "I've kind of seen the franchise be this game that everyone loved, to now this ecosystem and center of the culture of the sport itself," said John Shepherd, a producer on the game since 2009 and now its general manager. Today, what began as FIFA International Soccer in 1993 has grown into a juggernaut that is widely believed to be the best-selling sports video game franchise of all time by some distance -- with 325 million units sold by 2021, more than double the 150 million Madden had sold by that time. The two words that keep coming up when speaking to the makers of FIFA International Soccer: isometric view. Imagine a cube facing you on a screen. It's in two dimensions. Because it's projected onto a flat surface, it looks like a square. You can see only one side of it. Now, twist it a little and tilt it down so that the cube's flanks and its ceiling become visible. Suddenly, it looks three-dimensional, but it's still 2D. Boom: isometric view. That was the secret sauce from the start. Sensible Soccer and Kick Off had top-down, bird's-eye views of the action; FIFA cracked the isometric view. It made it look more like the way the sport appeared on TV; it made it look a lot more like, well, soccer. Jan Tian, who led development on the first version of the game in Vancouver, began to figure out the various problems a soccer game presented. How to get a soccer ball to behave like one, for a start. And, most vexingly, how to get all 22 players on the field to move intelligently and not just cluster around the ball, a crucial aspect of gameplay in a sport that's as much about spacing as anything else. This was tricky, considering that computers had little processing power then, and the entire game had to fit within 1.5 megabytes -- roughly the size of a medium-sized digital picture nowadays. When Tian showed his colleagues what he had come up with, they crowded around his screen and cheered, standing on tables just to get a peek. An executive took note of the enthusiasm and moved up the game's launch date to ship before Christmas of 1993. Everyone involved in the game could sense that they were on to something special. "We just had fun playing that game," Santamaria said. "It wasn't like anything we had played before. It allowed me to put myself on that pitch and gave me control. Jan nailed the playability of it right from Day 1." Counterintuitively, FIFA International Soccer's other differentiator in the crowded market of early games was that it played slowly. Sensible Soccer was quick. FIFA's pacing was more deliberate and ponderous -- more reflective of a sport that only occasionally rewards long spells of frustration. Even in these early years, EA Sports, which had just been renamed from Electronic Arts Sports Network after some legal threats by ESPN, had made it a policy to prioritize realism in its games. It was betting that in the end, realism would hold on to the player's attention span longer than an arcade style. It helped that Tian and his team were making the game far from EA's headquarters in Silicon Valley. "It was total freedom," Aubanel said. "It was a huge advantage because we could do things and nobody would really notice or care. So, we could take bigger risks than other teams could. Everyone knew the other sports really well; they would get a lot of 'feedback' from sales and marketing. We were so far away from the market, and the U.S. didn't care about us, that we kind of got to run our own show." When it came time to name the game, which had gone by "EA Soccer" internally, the company initially wanted to name it Team USA Soccer, to the horror of the London office that would have to sell the thing in Europe. Instead, EA decided it wanted soccer's equivalent to its Madden or NHL titles, except there really wasn't one unifying league or name that would resonate with Americans. In the end, EA struck a five-year deal with global governing body FIFA for what one insider estimated at a tiny royalty of between 4% and 5% of sales. But not everyone understood why. "It was like, 'Why the f--- are we calling it FIFA? Because no one knows what FIFA is,'" Aubanel said. "'Why are we spending all this money for FIFA, literally making the brand for them? FIFA's just a bunch of lawyers in Switzerland.'" Then, there was another problem. The FIFA licensing deal bought EA nothing but those four letters. It didn't even lend the right to the World Cup, which was coming up, but had already been licensed to a different video game. The first version of the game would include 48 countries playing in various tournament formats, but no player or team or competition names of any kind. (It helped that nobody could stop the company from calling a team "France" or "Italy.") Instead, the developers came up with player names and put themselves in the game as the stars on their favorite teams. Before the game was released, EA Sports had already begun to change soccer. The sport wasn't organized for things such as licensing deals, and the video game's pursuit of rights nobody had bothered to formalize forced the sport to start thinking about these things. If EA Sports initially worried that Americans didn't care about soccer and therefore wouldn't be interested in playing a soccer video game, the FIFA/EAFC franchise solved its own problem. As American interest bent toward the world's game, the video game was an obvious accelerant to that trend. In a sense, it made its own market. An oft-cited 2014 poll conducted for ESPN found that 34% of Americans became fans of soccer because of the FIFA franchise. That exact number was replicated by research commissioned by EA in July 2025. It also found that in 18- to 27-year-olds, 40% consider EAFC as their "entry point" into soccer. While the game became ever more prominent, however, some of its features also became controversial with a subset of hardcore players. They feel that the wildly popular Ultimate Team player packs, which you must buy separately from the game proper, have gotten too expensive and offer too little reward, and that the pursuit of rare high-value items can feel like playing the lottery. In that sense, too, the game has adopted some of the energy of the soccer industry, squeezing its consumers for more revenue. Nevertheless, the game's swelling influence translates to real-life soccer, too. EA has opened 22 soccer fields in 14 countries and says it has helped half a million players gain access to outdoor pitches. It has built a training exercise library as a resource for coaches. Young Paris Saint-Germain star Bradley Barcola wears No. 29 in honor of Alex Hunter, a fictional player in an EAFC game mode called "The Journey" that lets you build a career as an imaginary player. When EA's development team heard the cast of the "Ted Lasso" TV series muse about their fictional Premier League team, AFC Richmond, getting into the game, it got done in EAFC 23. In fact, life has come to imitate art. Whereas the franchise spent its first decade or two pursuing realism, it caught up with reality and then overtook it. "We were looking at the broadcasters and how they were doing things and going, 'We have to make this look exactly like it does when you're watching a match,'" Shepherd said. "And then, a number of years ago, we said, 'Let's not be constrained by what happens in the broadcast today. Let's see what we can do and push things even further. What could you do if you could put a camera anywhere?'" The spider-camera, zipping over the field above the action, is now commonly used in elite soccer matches, but was inspired by angles offered in FIFA. In 2023, EAFC turned its attention to the women's game by adding women's club teams. Women's national teams had been in the game for seven years by that point, but this expansion demonstrated that the game could move the needle here, too. In Ultimate Team mode, where users can collect trading cards of their favorite players, a kind of post-gender market has taken hold. "Some of our favorite players on Ultimate Team, across genders, are these young, American NWSL players," said Nicole Baxter, an assistant producer on the women's side of EAFC who played professionally in Sweden and in the National Women's Soccer League. "The Trinity Rodmans, the Sophia Wilsons, the Mallory Swansons, across genders, people are equally as excited about these players. They're some of the most expensive players in the game, and they make it into the squads of people of every gender. People love them." EA's internal research found that 62% of EAFC gamers also engage with women's soccer in real-life. "Companies like EA Sports, they're not just doing it because it's the right thing," Baxter said. "They're actually seeing that they can make money. At the end of the day, that's a business decision to include the women in the game. They saw it as a good business investment. Right now, we're doing so well with the women, and we only have five leagues in Ultimate Team." After EAFC 26 launched, it took just 26 days for the number of women's player items used in online Ultimate Team matches to reach 1 billion. When FIFA International Soccer was released in North America and Europe in December 1993 on the Sega Genesis and Mega Drive (depending on your continent), EA hoped to sell about 300,000 copies in Europe. Within a month, it had shifted half a million. It led the video game charts in the UK for weeks. And by June 1994, when it had been ported over to other consoles, it even led the United States in Super Nintendo sales, while it was third on the Genesis. Success changed everything. It made careers for the development team members mostly in their late 20s -- not to mention their enormous bonuses because those were based on how a game's sales performed relative to expectations. What's more, FIFA allowed EA Sports to break into markets it had little access to because of its slate of American sports games. A sequel was quickly ordered, and the team suddenly had substantial clout in the company. "We were the lunatics running the asylum," Aubanel said. "We could get away with murder. We flew business class. The early days were sort of the most fun because it was insane. Then, it became much more corporate, much more buttoned-up." There was internal skepticism, too, that a sports game could be retooled and repackaged every year. "At the time, even as developers, we were thinking, 'How many changes can we make?'" Aubanel said. "We're simulating a sport, and the sport won't change. Soccer is still the same sport that it was 30 years ago. So are we going to be able to keep selling the same game to the customer?" From edition to edition, the game grew more sophisticated. Nick Wlodyka, senior vice president and group general manager of EAFC, started working on the game in 1995. He was a summer intern after his first year at a university in Vancouver where he studied business. The second edition of the game, FIFA Soccer 95, introduced club teams in eight leagues as EA Sports began hoovering up the sport's most valuable licenses. But the players still had generic names. For FIFA 96, Wlodyka -- the intern! -- was tasked with compiling real player names and assigning them a rating. The trouble was that he had no access to rosters and stats, let alone footage. Wlodyka went to embassies of the nations whose leagues he had to populate, such as South Korea, say, to get newspapers from which to scrape names and positions. "I'm sure I got more wrong than I got right," he said. "I remember trying to figure out who the different clubs were, who the different players were across leagues we'd never heard of." At first, he worked alone. Then, he built a network of experts in the sport -- coaches, scouts and such -- to be sounding boards for his assessments. Real-life soccer players care deeply about those assessments. "No matter who I come across in terms of footballers, the first thing they want to talk about: ratings," Wlodyka said. "The biggest impact is social currency among these footballers and how they're perceived among the community of football fans." "That is a huge topic -- yes, indeed it is," McKennie said. "Everybody either clowns each other about their ratings or brags about their ratings." McKennie, for his part, has a respectable 78 rating in EAFC 26. "I've expressed my feelings to the team [at EA Sports] about mine," he said, lighthearted as ever. "I think I can have a little bit better in some things, in my opinion." Realism became the game's calling card as new competitors, such as Pro Evolution Soccer, emerged, but that also raised expectations on developers. "When we got to 1,000 teams, it just became a grind," Aubanel said. "And every time we'd get some hair color wrong, we'd get grilled about it. And David Beckham changed his hairstyle every f---ing week. A mohawk one day and pink the next. Aw, f---." Today, the game updates a new hairstyle within hours. Producers have various channels to receive and respond to feedback from the game's players, such as forums, Discord channels or social media. They develop several versions of the game at the same time now -- the game's new features have grown so complex -- although some gamers complain that they would like to see more evolution from one version to the next. Nobody foresaw any of this some three and a half decades ago, while working on FIFA International Soccer, which was inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame in May. Not that a game that hoped to accurately mimic a sport would come to orbit it and then weave deeply into its culture. And certainly not that new editions would keep getting released in perpetuity.