The future of the FIFA series has been under the spotlight in recent months as EA is reportedly pretty sick of having to pay for the license. It was reported that EA CEO Andrew Wilson spoke with employees last year regarding the brand, claiming that it was “impeding” the series as a whole. With EA seemingly ready to ditch the FIFA brand, many questions were raised as to what the publisher’s highly popular football series would be called next. Turns out we might now have an answer.
Industry insider Jeff Grubb has claimed in his Grubbsnax! show that rather than paying billions of dollars for a name, EA is simply going to rebrand the series as EA Sports Football Club - EA Sports FC for short. Grubb has also revealed that the governing body FIFA has updated its trademark to include video games, suggesting that FIFA will continue as a series, but under a completely new development team. Whether this will be an existing developer or if FIFA is planning to form its own development team is currently unknown.
“They’re gonna have to go against EA Sports Football Club which is gonna be the name of the game - EA Sports FC. That’s the name that kinda leaked recently. I saw the trademarks for it. I was like okay that could just be like a feature, like a new online so let’s be careful. I asked around about it. That’s it, that’s the name. At least that’s the name as it’s planned right now.”
As for the next game in the series, a report from VGC last month claimed that FIFA 23 is still going ahead, but future installments will likely ditch the brand entirely. It was also claimed that Wilson wanted to ditch the brand so the developers could work on more experimental game modes, stating that the FIFA organization has been pretty insistent that the series sticks to traditional 11v11 gameplay. These are just unconfirmed reports, but could be additional reasoning as to why EA seems ready to rebrand.
It’ll be interesting to see if changing the name of the games affect how they perform, especially if FIFA starts producing its own line of games. As Grubb states, people will likely still buy the games as the gameplay is what matters at the end of the day, but the rebrand could be a potential PR nightmare for EA. All FIFA fans need to know for now is that FIFA 23 is still going ahead, but after that, things could get a bit more complicated.