> EA is chump change compared to world football. They've got no leverage, and despite the dislike for FIFA everywhere, a power struggle between the two with EA casting itself as the righteous party will only invite backlash.
You sure about that? EA's revenue for the last fiscal year was 5.6 billion dollars. FIFA's revenue for the last 4 years is about equal to that dollar amount. There's a lot more money in video games than people think.
I'm not talking about revenue. Football isn't really an industry, and it's not rational. If you want to compare the cultural and social footprint of football to something it's video games as a whole, not EA on its lonesome.
I mean you could probably supplant the entire FIFA organization with $10B if you wanted to take a really big swing. Money talks and if you funnel the right amount of money to the best players you will create the best sports league.
The biggest clubs in the world tried this several months ago - the $3.2 billion European Super League didn’t even last a week before it fell apart.
FIFA survives because it effectively sanctions competitions at every level. Take Manchester United: they play in the English Premier League. That competition is sanctioned by the English FA - a member of UEFA, the European body of FIFA. If United make it into European competition, they play in a competition organized by UEFA. Their players represent their national teams all over the world, and compete in matches run by UEFA, CONMEBOL, and other FIFA governing bodies.
When Manchester United announced they were joining the Super League in lieu of the UEFA sanctioned European competitions, the FA announced that they were at risk of expulsion from the English league structure because the FA bylaws say you can only play matches sanctioned by FIFA/UEFA - essentially pulling the league and cup competitions away from them and turning them into a glorified exhibition team. And the fans went ballistic at this, for good reason.
Was the ESL a trial balloon? Almost certainly, and we will see something similar, possibly to just force UEFAs hand in negotiating things like revenue sharing. But supplanting FIFA would be much harder than “throwing money at the problem”.
Those players would be excluding themselves from all known international football and from transferring to and fro all current clubs and leagues on earth. That would be _complete suicide_. They'd become nobodies overnight.
10B probably isn't even enough to buy out the PL, much less the world football pyramid.
So yeah, it's a lot of money today, but at least that part of it is a revenue stream that IMO is vulnerable on a number of fronts, including regulatory issues, changing consumer sentiment, platform crackdowns, etc. It's a lot of eggs in one basket for EA, vs FIFA which is a household name for which much of the revenue should be extremely "safe".
See it this way. If FIFA decides to award the License to another Publisher, then also other license givers will award them to the new publisher instead of EA. No football executive cares much about the relationship with a gaming studio but for sure about their goodstanding within the corrupt FIFA system.
You sure about that? EA's revenue for the last fiscal year was 5.6 billion dollars. FIFA's revenue for the last 4 years is about equal to that dollar amount. There's a lot more money in video games than people think.