EA Sports FC 24’s integration of female players has been excellent, and their addition to Ultimate Team deserves real praise. Yet exactly why warrants contextualising, because this could have gone so drastically wrong.
Now for those not well-versed in football, EA Sports FC 24 will attract the usual share of criticisms. Not to dismiss those views, but they are for another time. Here, EA have been brilliant in how they’ve added women to the mode, allowing for mixed-gender teams in a very popular part of the game. So, in all its finer detail, here’s why.
The newest iteration, of what was the FIFA franchise, again has a very active Ultimate Team section. This sees people buying players and forming squads via earning packs or purchasing individuals through in-game currency. New teams can also be obtained by tackling objectives which can earn more packs and more currency to make bids on individual players, it can get surprisingly close to a Pokemon-esque feel. Yes, you can buy packs with real-world money, but pay-to-win is for another article and EA do provide enough objectives to obtain players without using money – this writer hasn’t spent a penny and has some impressive teams.
So for some quick context for those who are not fans of football: after literal decades of being held back, then similar decades of hard work and graft, the women’s game has been gathering serious pace over the past decade. It is delightfully taking a great deal more praise with huge attendances, games more often being held at stadiums like Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge, and the coverage is becoming a lot better. The year this writer covered a Women’s Super League team, the 2018/19 season, was the first year the league was fully professional. From an English perspective, the recent Women’s World Cup and the prior Euros win caught the nation’s attention in a way never seen before. Despite a long list of historical wrongs to the game, it is starting to feel like it is in a positive place and the Euros win was a glorious day, well at least for the English fans – after all, football did come home.
But how does this factor into EA Sports FC? Well, this could be a dissertation-length piece and still feel too short, but sports fans following a whiff of casual intrigue can go a long way. You’ll sit there and watch a match, have a player catch your eye and then google them to learn more about which club they play for and their previous teams. For more individual sports like tennis, you may even follow their careers from that point on or make more of an effort to watch their match if it’s on TV. You want to learn more because you’ve seen a performance or a personality that is entertaining to see in full flow. The natural interest is there; in football especially you’ll struggle to have a long conversation about the sport without a player coming up in discussion and Wikipedia subsequently being consulted.
Ultimate Team provides a platform for that natural intrigue to build and be followed. EA has excelled because of how the players are rated (ie, how well they perform), especially when there is the possibility of having mixed-gender teams. This is where things could have gone so badly wrong.
See the two sides of the sport are unfortunately not equal, especially and staggeringly on the finance front. The Ballon d’Or is the most prestigious individual award a player can receive, so let’s compare the salaries of the two recent winners.
Aitana Bonmati, the female recipient, reportedly earns $216,915 a year, while Lionel Messi, victorious on the men’s side, earns $1.2 million a week. The latter earns 250 times more than the former, so just think how much that impacts every single stage of a career and the facilities, the freedoms available to each player and the lack of financial worry for when they retire. It doesn’t compare in the slightest; financially the two sides of the same sport might as well be on different planets. Obviously, there are biological differences present as well and this writer is not a scientist, nor an actor who can pretend to be a genius. Anyway, all of these add up to a fair inequality even still.
Look, for the record, the entertainment in sports comes from close competition, not sheer power or speed. Yes, you want to watch the elite or top level within that sport, but for it to be entertaining it has to be competitive. The worst league in the world is not the lowest one in any pyramid; it is the one with the least competition.
Anyway, writing neuroticism aside, these differences are only relevant because EA decided to ignore all of them, which is a relief and the perfect way to handle it. Female players are rated and perform as well as the men do.
The natural intrigue that can lie in wait has been brilliant. See when this writer conceded a headed effort from the edge of the box, they didn’t know anything about the player scoring. So they naturally wanted to know more as the brief stats indicated she was a very good player and who would fit into their Women’s Super League squad, so sure enough Caitlin Foord was added to the team.
EA have historically not been lazy with regards to player ratings within the franchise; they have been proven more accurate than you might think over the years. If you want a rough idea of how good a player is, or if they’re improving, then the franchise has not been a bad resource over the years but it is by no means fact. So by just seeing the female players and their ratings, you get a good sense of which players are fantastic, who are the fading former heroes and who could be the stars of the future. In essence, even those who had never really engaged with women’s football at all in the past are building up a great knowledge of the game, whether they like it or not.
This next aspect is the one which doesn’t have enough data, and even when the data arrives, should the hypothesis be true, it will be a result of a large number of factors, i.e. impossible to gauge the effect.
Let’s start with the logic before the conclusion: people playing the game have built up a greater knowledge, of which teams are brilliant, which ones aren’t and the individual quality of each player. This now makes the stories that unfold within the sport much easier to engage with and understand. The conclusion is surely better attendance at the matches themselves.
It is an inevitability, the fear of not knowing the teams within the sport and in particular the players will vanish. It is no secret how passionate fans are about their chosen team, so mentally there will be no education period, so to speak, for those who have played the video game, but who have not engaged with the respective women’s team. So more people will start seeing their favourite team’s women’s side as another easy way to engage with their club, thus boosting attendance.
It has been a long road to get to this point. Female players were first added in FIFA 16, via 12 national teams that could only compete against each other. Then, in FIFA 22, the next sizable addition came in the form of being able to create a female player in the Pro Clubs mode, where you play solely as one player in matches. Finally, in FIFA 23, the last iteration before it became EA Sports FC, full women’s leagues were added for the first time before the Ultimate Team addition in the current game. There can always be more expansion: the depth of players available in the men’s side is far better, so there is a way to go. Yet this is a great point for the franchise to have finally achieved in terms of recognising women’s football.
EA Sports has provided an excellent environment for more engagement with women’s football. This could have been handled badly and yes, the argument of criticism is there for why it took so long. Yet beyond that, it is just nice to see the franchise reach this point. The women’s game should have an exciting few years ahead of it as it continues to grow, and having such a notable side-product like EA Sports FC firmly on its side can only help.
One goal doesn’t win a league, but this one still feels significant.
