Fifa to be renamed ‘EA Sports Football Club’

After nearly 30 years of partnership, EA and Fifa are reportedly splitting up with the Football franchise being rebranded as ‘EA Sports Football Club’.

This has been confirmed by Gaming Journalist Jeff Grubb on his podcast Grubnsnax who said that his sources have confirmed the change.

“EA Sports Football Club, EA Sports FC, that’s the name of the game, I saw trademarks for it, I thought that could be just a feature like an online mode, I asked around about it and that’s it, that’s the name.”

The reason for this split is allegedly due to the documented tension between Electronic Arts and Fifa. EA stated last year that they believed that their games would be of better quality without the Fifa branding.

Notably, in the previous report, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said that Fifa impeded the developers from adding new features into the game and that the football organization wanted to double their license fees to 2.5 billion USD “over the next decade”.

“Our players tell us they want more modes of play, different things beyond 11v11 and different types of gameplay. I would tell you, it’s been a fight to get FIFA to acknowledge the types of things that we want to create because they say our license only covers certain categories”.

They even stated that they felt Fifa was just the name on the box and that they did not need those four letters for their games to succeed.

“Our FIFA license has actually precluded us from doing a lot of this stuff. Again, FIFA is just the name on the box, but they’ve precluded our ability to be able to branch into the areas that players want.”

EA’s current contract with Fifa will be expiring after the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Sources from VGC and other news sites indicate that EA will go ahead with the name Fifa 23 for this year, however, it may be the last.

EA usually announces the latest Fifa sports game in June before realizing the game in the fall. We will likely see the name of the latest Fifa game around this time.

The most recent Fifa game released in Fifa 22 was released for PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Google Stadia.