This year, EA Sports dropped the FIFA license after decades of working with the international soccer governing body. The renaming to EA Sports FC 24 hasn’t been too impactful on total sales (though physical sales in the UK are down significantly), largely because EA still has licenses for most of the major leagues and players around the world. However, back in the 90s, things weren’t as locked in as they are now. Not having the FIFA license at that point would have been a major hit to the franchise, potentially giving another company to take over as the top-selling soccer game on the market. A recent interview with Tom Stone, EA’s former vice president of marketing, revealed that PlayStation itself almost made that move before passing.
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Stone recently gave the interview to Time Extension. There, he spoke about how the licensing agreement with FIFA was up for renewal in 1997 and Sony was given the opportunity to steal the license for its own soccer series. While most players nowadays probably don’t remember Adidas Power Soccer, it sounds like that series almost got the FIFA name in the late 90s after the company responsible for the license reached out to Sony behind EA’s back and offered them the exclusive worldwide rights.
Why Didn’t PlayStation Get the FIFA Rights?
In his talk with Time Extension, Stone said, “Chris Deering [the president of Sony PlayStation Europe at the time] met with me and said, ‘We’ve been offered the rights to FIFA Soccer’. I said, ‘You have got to be effing joking. Seriously? ISL has approached you and asked if you would like an exclusive worldwide license for FIFA? After everything we’ve done for them?’ I was really cross. But Chris said to me, ‘I will not sign that deal unless you can’t come to terms with FIFA. That’s your deal. You created that.’ Obviously, Chris was looking ‘big picture’ at the support that EA gave to PlayStation worldwide. I think that would have been an interesting conversation had Sony signed that deal, though. I think EA would have responded quite badly to that.”
It seems that Sony decided to not try to steal the deal to solidify its third-party relationship with EA. Obviously, hindsight is 20/20, but that was probably the correct decision. After all, even at the time, EA’s FIFA games were much more popular than Power Soccer. If it had taken the license it might’ve lost that relationship with a massive publisher and also hurt the FIFA brand at an important time.
This news also might point to how tenuous the relationship between EA and FIFA has always been. For years, it was very successful for both parties, but this interview with Stone shows that FIFA was, at least at the time, looking to go in a new direction. It may have taken a few decades, but it’s finally happened, though it seems to have worked out more in EA’s favor, at this point.
EA Sports FC 24 is available now on PlayStation, Switch, Xbox, and PC platforms.
