EA’s FIFA Spreads Homegrown Interest

by
November 25, 2014

Impressive sales numbers aside — Electronic Arts’ (EA) FIFA games have sold over 100 million copies throughout the franchise’s life — the game has been sowing the seeds of genuine soccer interest in the United States. While the latest version of the game, FIFA 2015, has been out for more than two months now, one of the best signs of increased home interest in the beautiful game is the record of online play for FIFA 14.

Even since March of this year — prior to the United States men’s national team improbably making it out of group play in the World Cup — soccer in general and Major League Soccer in particular was growing. As a joint effort between ESPN Sports Poll and Luker on Trends shows, for the first time ever MLS has reached the same level of fandom (measured by 12-17 year-olds who claimed avid interest) as Major League Baseball.

Luker on Trends partnered with EA again to release their latest data, showing distinct growth in online play as an MLS club from 2014 to 2015. The most popular clubs, Seattle Sounders, New York Red Bulls and L.A. Galaxy, come as no surprise given the super stars such as Clint Dempsey, Thierry Henry and Landon Donovan respectively, are all available to start slotting goals home.

fifa

It would be difficult to understate the importance of the US youth showing such an interest in the world sport for the future of the USMNT and USWNT teams. With more violent sports such as football being ruled out by certain professional athletes, specifically citing soccer, it is possible that some of our nation’s best young athletes will be turning to soccer for their competitive outlet.

(Header and graphic via EA.com)

 

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.




 

You can catch David spouting off about baseball, soccer, esports and other things by following him on twitter, @davidwiers.

1 Comment
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Samuel Franco
11 years ago

And FIFA supports slavery. Do not support this product or this blog, which provides FIFA free good press without calling into question greater concerns.

0