Zlatan Ibrahimovic has been linked to countless controversies over the years. He’s a fantastic footballer, and has been for two decades, but it’s hard to point to anyone else who is as consistently and stupidly combative. He once told Dutch midfielder Rafael Van der Vaart, “I’ll break your legs and cut off your fucking head” after the latter accused him of intentionally injuring him, and has made a habit out of regularly kicking his teammates. That’s not even including some of the wild things he’s said during interviews.
That being said, Ibra’s current argument against EA - whether or not you agree with it - is important.
For those who don’t know what I’m on about, Ibra was the first of several hundred professional football players to consider taking legal action against EA Sports for using their likenesses in FIFA 21.
As it stands, EA secures the rights to players’ names and appearances differently depending on the country. In the UK, EA Sports pens a deal with the Premier League itself, gaining the rights to every single player currently signed to a participating team’s roster.
In other countries, however, it works a bit differently. Ibrahimovic plays for AC Milan, who compete in Italy’s Serie A. The Serie A as a body has nothing to do with EA Sports’ FIFA franchise - instead, each individual team provides the rights to all of its players’ appearances.
And so it seems that EA Sports has properly gone about obtaining the right to include players in its video games. As noted in the statement TheGamer recently received from FIFPRO, the organization tasked with representing approximately 65,000 professional players from all over the world:
FIFPRO, a not-for-profit organisation, acquires image rights via player unions in nearly 60 countries. These rights are made available to Electronic Arts and other clients in the video gaming industry. FIFPRO’s relationship with the video gaming companies complements separate arrangements they directly agree with clubs, leagues, governing bodies and individual players. FIFPRO member unions decide how best to use the revenue generated, either by distributing funds directly among players or providing services in kind such as legal advice, second-career planning and mental and physical assistance. FIFPro is reaching out to the players and their representation that have recently raised concerns so we can address their questions
This statement is quite wishy-washy - “FIFPRO member unions decide how best to use the revenue generated” is some shady phrasing given that the point of FIFPRO is to represent individual players. It’s one thing for it to orchestrate deals with multi-billion dollar companies like EA Sports, but it does seem strange to effectively have a massive, global trade union that doesn’t directly coordinate with each and every one of its members on an individual basis. The fact that “services in kind such as legal advice, second-career planning, and mental and physical assistance” are placed on equal footing here as “distributing funds directly among players” is weird - if there is revenue being generated by a player’s appearance in a game, you would assume that the player in question is entitled to at least a percentage of it, as opposed to some career advice from someone who is not their agent.
EA Sports appears to have obtained the rights to players in accordance with the law, but the law itself is a new-age one. FIFA has been around since FIFA 94, but somehow this question of rights to revenue generated from your own name hasn’t been much of a focal point since. Oliver Kahn sued EA Sports (and won) back in 2003 for including his likeness in the series without his consent. Kahn wasn’t affiliated with either FIFPRO or the Bundesliga at the time, and EA had no leg to stand on insofar as its catch-all negotiations for player rights go.
But things are different now - FIFA’s main monetary driving force is FUT, where players generate hundreds of millions in microtransactions. It was one thing for a club to license all of its players’ likenesses out back in 2003, but it’s a drastically different case in 2020, where superstars like Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, and Kevin de Bruyne are virtual cash printers for EA Sports.
It’s obviously not reasonable to assume that EA Sports can go around asking for every single player in FIFA’s personal permission given that the games are released on a yearly basis, although this new argument presents an opportunity to interrogate the current system, which favours the publisher far more than the players it profits off. Maybe FIFA will eventually need to head down the PES route and use fake player names, or perhaps clubs could contractually introduce image licensing rights on an individual basis for each player they sign. Maybe the 300 or so players currently considering taking EA to court - which also includes Spurs superstar Gareth Bale - will back down. Regardless of what happens, or who is involved, this is a conversation that is important to the digital age, and important when it comes to who profits off which people’s talents.
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