Creating the EA Sports FC Brand and Life after FIFA

On the latest Footballco Business Podcast,?our guest is? David Jackson , VP of Brand for EA Sports FC - the brand replacing FIFA as the title of EA Sports' football video game series.

David joined us to talk about the creation of the FC visual identity, as well as how the new brand goes beyond a logo and what we can expect from it in the future.

Three highlights from the show are below, but if you want to download and listen to the full show, you can search for the Footballco Business Podcast or?click here.

Why Triangles?

When you watch the brand reveal video for EA Sports FC you realise that everything is triangles, but that wasn't always the case. When David and his team published the brief it included the line "Football comes in many different colours, but only very few shapes."

What David meant by that was that there is a tapestry of football and that brings with it colours and associations, whether that's the white of Real Madrid, the yellow or Borussia Dortmund or the black and white of Juventus. But there are very few shapes in football. As David explains...

There are some really obvious shapes in football, the sphere of the ball, the rectangles of either the goal structure, or the pitch markings. But we really needed one that spoke to the soul of the sport. And that was true of our games, too. And triangles are the language of the beautiful game you think about Croatia and Pep [Guardiola]...And when we looked into it, those very original first games that we built, they existed on this isometric view. That was intentional because 8-bit games didn't really support 3D... And then there are the polygons in the game, when we spoke to our studio team...One of the guys said, 'Well, yeah, actually, the very atomic unit of our game, the very smallest polygon that makes up the game, they're all triangular. The obvious one is the player indicator symbol that sits above every athlete's head, in every game. And that's the one that really nailed it for us, that is a symbol that's unique to our platform.

Life After FIFA

When it was announced in 2022 that EA Sports and FIFA were parting ways there was a lot of discussion about what that meant for fans, the game and brands too. While David is not yet able to discuss the forthcoming game in terms of gameplay, he was able to open up about what it means to go from, in his words 'renting the farm to owning it'.

FIFA, as I said, was a fantastic partner and it authenticated and verified our platform very early on in our existence as being the de facto, authentic football experience. But, as the scope and scale of our business grows, we need to have freedom of genre and modality of play...FIFA rightly had some contractual stipulations on us that meant that we were limited to simulation football or other areas and we know football's popularity extends far beyond that and we have an opportunity now to explore the broadest possible dimensions of global fandom through our experiences....There are then also partner networks. So again, FIFA has its partners and they were understandably given a lot of primacy over FIFA-branded products, including our EA Sports FIFA games. And that meant some restrictions on major investors in football, you know, in the apparel or technology broadcast or consumer goods categories.

Expect More Women's Football

FIFA 23, as well as featuring Chelsea's Sam Kerr on the cover, also added women's club teams for the first time, with the Women’s Super League (WSL) and the French Division 1 Feminine. Since then, it's gone on to add more European teams, as well as teams from the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL).

David spoke on the podcast about working with Sam Kerr and the role women's football plays not just in growing the sport through the video game, but also understanding that young fans engage with women's football very differently to older fans.

It's phenomenally important for us that we elevate and accelerate women's football through our platform. I think the opportunity is immense and the opportunity for us to establish a platform for women's football to grow and scale is meaningful...There's lots of new content coming to the platform. Even in FIFA 23, we added a bunch of leagues and we'll continue to do that. People can expect that to grow and scale because we think that we can access a brand new demographic through that content and we can serve players with the content that they love and they're beginning to kind of start a lifelong love affair with those leagues.

To listen to the full show, you can search for the Footballco Business Podcast or?click here.

If you want to hear more stories behind the creation and marketing of football video games, check out our interview with Alan Grainger, Head of Brand and Marketing at Sports Interactive, the studio behind the Football Manager video game.