Back when EA Sports and FIFA–the governing body for world football–worked together, if there was one thing they did better than anything else, it was licensing. EA were able to bring down rivals PES (Konami’s competing series) not because they made the better game, but because they had the more authentic deals. If you bought PES you’d be playing mostly as a bunch of made-up teams playing in make-believe leagues. Buy FIFA and you’d be playing with real teams in their real kits in their real stadiums.
That’s a huge deal for sports fans! So it’s incredible, if not also unsurprising given everything else going on, to see FIFA’s latest attempt at a video game (FIFA Heroes, an upcoming casual/arcade five-a-side game developed by a studio that normally makes VR games) start showing itself off in such a bizarre way.
Please, Tell Me More About The New FIFA Game And The Money Behind It
None of this sounds exciting, in the slightest
(Note: Heroes is a different FIFA game to the one I wrote about last month)
I can’t embed the game’s latest trailer directly here, but a number of sequences were, as someone who follows football and football video games pretty closely, surprising to see! For starters, the players it features are wearing officially-licensed shirts…from 2022-23. It’s now March 2026. All teams involved in the clip (England, France and Argentina feature most prominently) have released new kits then new kits again since these were the ones they wore on the field. If you’re going to get a license, why not get the right one, or at least show the latest version of it?
Pause the trailer and you’ll also see that there are patches on the player’s sleeves…patches they wore during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, not those of the upcoming 2026 World Cup taking place in the United States, Mexico and Canada. The ball they’re using, however, is the official ball of the 2026 World Cup.
Here’s Jack Grealish in a video released in 2026 but which sure looks like it was put together a long, long time ago
Then there are the players themselves. Jack Grealish features heavily, a player who was very exciting for marketing teams a few years back (like so much else in this clip, around 2022), but who was sent out on loan from his parent club Manchester City last year to Everton before getting injured and missing much of this season recovering from surgery. His last game for England was in 2024, and he won’t be in the 2026 squad either.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not here to nit-pick a casual sports game’s marketing for the sake of it. My main issue here is that this whole thing appears to be weirdly unsupervised, in a way I’ve never seen in an officially-licensed sports video game before. Normally they’re either very strictly controlled or there are few/no licenses whatsoever; to feature so many of them here, but have them be so inconsistently applied, suggests that either this game has been in development for way too long, was shelved years ago and has been dug out of storage or that nobody involved at any step of the process really gives a shit. Maybe it’s all three!
Whatever the reason, the days of the FIFA brand being synonymous with video game authenticity are long gone. Then again, on the list of public relations concerns the organisation has at the moment, that’s probably not the most pressing one.
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