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Top Footballers Are Arguing With FIFA About Using Their Likeness In Games

Imogen Mellor

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Top Footballers Are Arguing With FIFA About Using Their Likeness In Games

Featured Image Credit: Zlatan Ibrahimovic (via Twitter) / Gareth Bale (via Twitter)

A large part of the draw for sports games like FIFA, NBA, and NHL, is that you get to relive your heroes' journey in some way. Controlling some of the best players in the world as they work perfectly together to score awe-inspiring goals is as close as many of us will get to touching a Premier League pitch ourselves. The FIFA games do everything they can to bring real footballers to life on the pitch so you can feel part of the action, but now some top players are questioning who gave EA the right to use their faces.

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Zlatan Ibrahimovic of AC Milan asked the question on Twitter, about who gave the developers the right to use his likeness without him giving his full consent on the matter. He tweeted out, "Who gave FIFA EA Sport permission to use my name and face? FIFPro? I'm not aware to be a member of Fifpro and if I am I was put there without any real knowledge through some weird manoeuvre. And for sure I never allowed FIFAcom or Fifpro to make money using me.

"Somebody is making profit on my name and face without any agreement all these years. Time to investigate."

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Another player, Tottenham Hotspur's Gareth Bale publicly joined the dispute too. Despite having been on the cover of FIFA 14 years ago, it seems he has a problem with the process too. "Ibra_official Interesting... what is FIFPro? #TimeToInvestigate," he says in what seems like concurrence.


According to SPORTbible, there are thousands of other players who are ready to join in the objection to their likeness being used in the game without consent. Although there are deals that go on behind the scenes it now seems obvious that the players don't actually agree to their faces being put in the game, and now they're questioning EA's process.

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The developers, EA, have responded to SPORTbible, however, when asked about the situation. A spokesperson says, "EA SPORTS FIFA is the world's leading football video game, and to create an authentic experience year after year we work with numerous leagues, teams and individual talent to secure the rights of player likeness to include in our game.

"One of those is a long-standing relationship with the global representative of professional football players, FIFPro, who partner with a number of licensors to negotiate deals that benefit the players and their unions."

Perhaps this is the beginning of the process that will lead to completely fictional footballers taking the place of real names in FIFA - perhaps this will just lead to more of the microtransactions money getting back to the players. Either way, it'll be interesting to see if a legal process comes to light, and how it changes the relationship between footballers and the FIFA games.

Topics: News, FIFA 21

Imogen Mellor
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