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GameLook report/Recently, the International Football Federation (FIFA) officially announced that it has signed a multi-year cooperation agreement with Sports Interactive (SI), the developer of the well-known football simulation management game “Football Manager” (Football Manager).
This means that players will once again have the opportunity to experience various events officially authorized by FIFA in the game, the most eye-catching of which is undoubtedly the World Cup, a global event that occurs every four years. The official also announced that the related content of the linkage will be launched in various branch versions of “FM26” (includingFM26, FM26 console version and FM26 touch screen version) goes online.
However, this is not a simple alliance between powerful forces, but more like a faltering self-rescue in the field of digital entertainment after FIFA said goodbye to its former “money printing machine” – EA’s “FIFA” series.
In 2022, FIFA and EA had huge differences over the licensing fee issue during contract renewal negotiations. FIFA’s sky-high licensing fee of more than US$1 billion made even the wealthy EA feel like “blackmail”.
EA CEO Andrew Wilson was even more blunt in an internal meeting: “The FIFA brand, apart from the four letters on the box, has limited value to us.”
This confidence stems from the huge moat that EA has built over the past three decades – a licensing network covering major leagues, clubs and tens of thousands of players around the world, as well as unrivaled game development and operation capabilities.
In the end, EA chose to “leave home” and renamed the game “EA Sports FC”. With its strong market inertia and product quality, it achieved unprecedented success. “EA Sports FC 25” became one of the best-selling games in the world last year.
Looking back at FIFA, Chairman Infantino made bold remarks at the beginning of the breakup, claiming that he would create the “only, true and best” football game and open the door to all game developers. However, reality quickly gave a loud slap in the face.
They first made a high-profile announcement to enter the metaverse and cooperated with the emerging platform Roblox in an attempt to attract young users. However, the content they launched was more casual and entertainment-oriented, far from the hard-core simulation experience expected by core fans, and the market response was mediocre.
What is even more surprising is that FIFA immediately announced four Web3 games based on blockchain technology. This move not only failed to restore its reputation, but further eroded the professionalism and authority of its brand.
After a series of unsuccessful attempts, the market once pinned its hopes on another sports game giant, 2K Games, a subsidiary of Take-Two.
However, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick’s public response completely extinguished the flames. His words also accurately described the cruel truth of the current sports simulation game market. Zelnick said frankly: “We have never been involved in the field of football before. I think it is a huge project to form a team, build a game, build a brand, and then compete in a field that already has very strong competitors.”
This “sober” statement actually speaks to the aspirations of all potential challengers. The development of modern sports simulation games is no longer as simple as purchasing an IP license. It requires years of technology accumulation, a huge player and league authorization network, complex physics engines and AI algorithms, and a mature global distribution and operation system.
EA has been running on this track for thirty years, and the barriers it has established are almost insurmountable.
It is against this background that the cooperation between FIFA and Sports Interactive seems logical. Looking at the global market, except for EA, the only players that can have deep accumulation and stable player groups in the vertical field of football simulation are the “Football Manager” series, which is famous for its data and strategic depth.
However, this is not a perfect option for FIFA. Although “Football Manager” is known as “the most detailed football encyclopedia”, its core gameplay is management, rather than stadium competition controlled by players, and its audience is relatively niche and hard-core.
More importantly, the “Football Manager” series itself is also facing a development bottleneck. In recent years, many veteran players have criticized its updated content for being “lack of sincerity” and “replacing the same ingredients without changing the medicine.” The much-anticipated new 3D match engine has also been criticized for its poor performance after its launch.
Although the developer SI was planning to use the new Unity engine in “FM25”, it canceled the development of “FM25” earlier this year due to technical difficulties encountered during the development process.
Therefore, this cooperation is more like a “huddling together for warmth” where everyone gets what they need. For SI, obtaining official authorization from FIFA, especially the addition of the World Cup, will undoubtedly greatly enhance the brand value and appeal of the game, adding important weight to its risky step of engine innovation.
For FIFA, although this is a far less “expedient measure” than the cooperation with EA back then, it is also one of the few life-saving straws that FIFA can grasp in the current market environment.
However, now that FIFA has extended its olive branch of cooperation to the Japanese manufacturer SEGA (the parent company of SI), this has also triggered new speculation from GameLook: In the future, will they set their sights on the East, especially Chinese gaming companies with strong interest in the competitive gaming track and strong capital, such as Tencent?
Theoretically, there is some room for imagination in this kind of cooperation.
But the practical obstacles are equally huge. The first thing to bear the brunt is still the issue of “money”. FIFA’s stringent requirements for licensing fees were the trigger for its breakup with EA. Tencent may be more inclined to invest funds in the construction of service-oriented games or e-sports ecology that can operate in the long term and continue to generate revenue, rather than one-time high licensing.
Therefore, although the possibility of future cooperation cannot be completely ruled out, in the short term, the marriage between FIFA and the Chinese gaming giant will still face a huge gap in business models and profit distribution.
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