On November 23rd Zlatan Ibrahimovic sent out a tweet heard round the soccer and gaming world. In it he stated that EA Sports through FIFA video games were profiting of his name, image and likeness without his permission. The tweet questioned how this was happening and implored further investigation. Tottenham striker, Gareth Bale , replied to Zlatan “Interesting… what is @FIFPro ? #TimeToInvestigate.”
Zlatan stated that he never negotiated a deal with EA Sports or gave permission directly to them to use his name, image, likeness, or statistics for the FIFA 21 or any of the previous editions of the video game. Bale made similar claims and was even on the cover in 2014. So how does the licensing for the FIFA video game work and who does it?
Similar to the way the National Football League Players Association (“NFLPA”) negotiates group licensing deals for professional football players in the NFL for the Madden video game series, the International Federation of Professional Footballers (or Fifpro for short), is a global players union that negotiates licensing and image deals on behalf of its members, professional soccer players. Fifpro consists of 65 member associations. If a member association is not part of Fifpro, Fifpro or the video game manufacturer must get permission from the team and/or individual players in order to include them in the game. English Premier League teams tend to sell their licensing rights for video games collectively as a league. While teams in other leagues, like Serie A in Italy, do not.
This licensing structure is what EA Sports described when rebutting Zlatan’s claims on Twitter. EA points to the agreement they made earlier this year with AC Milan, the club Zlatan plays for. In this agreement EA acquired a license to use the Italian clubs logo, jerseys, and the name, image, and likeness of its teams for FIFA21. Zlatan claimed to not know about this.
Did Zlatan really not know about Fifpro or why was he being so vocal now? Maybe Zlatan heard about the ruling from Brazilian court in June. The class action lawsuit filed by the Union of Athletes of Santa Catarina against EA Sports resulted in a R $6.5 Million ruling against EA for violating the image rights for the published games from 2005-2014. EA made the same Fifpro licensing argument but lost the case because this Brazilian team was not covered under the Fifpro license and EA needed to get each Brazilian players consent individually. This worked in Brazil but is not a winning argument for Zlatan while at AC Milan. According to the Athletic, there are thousands of other soccer players who are unhappy with EA for the same reasons as Zlatan and the heat on the video game giant has only begun.
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