Starting this year, EA won’t be publishing its yearly football game under the FIFA name any more. Starting 2023, football fans will have to get familiar with the name EA Sports FC.
And to that, EA has launched a teaser of sorts by flaunting the new EA Sports FC logo. It’s simple, just the EA Sports logo and an “FC” typeface shaped in an inverted triangle- and said triangle can be placed on the side or on the bottom of the EA Sports logo.
But it’s rather brilliant. The inverted triangle is a callback to one of the enduring UI designs that exist in almost all the FIFA games in the last 30 years, the marker to indicate who out of the 22 players on screen is currently controlled by the player.
The triangle motif is coincidentally a cool reference to Total Football, a play philosophy that dominated professional football when it first introduced in the 70s where the ball is passed between players in a fluid yet rigid way- the passing pattern happens to form into triangles.
Oh, and it’s also coincidentally a nod on the chemistry triangle, a feature players of the FIFA Ultimate Team modes should be familiar with. Ultimate Team is the big-money-maker mode in EA’s yearly sports games.
Still, the branding is recognisable, legible, and has plenty of meaning should one decide to dissect it. If there wasn’t any font or writing it could be good enough as a flag.
You can see below some mock-ups for the EAFC logo being plastered on merch, a football kit (it works really well as a club crest- maybe a club called… EAFC), and also on a flag.
And with the logo not being bounded by any particular colour, any other brand can co-opt it. Various teams, licensed leagues that feature in the game (which includes the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1, WSL, NWSL, CONMEBOL, MSL and even PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo help promote the new logo by introducing their variant of EAFC.
And football fans will definitely see the new FIFA-less EAFC branding. The new EA Sports FC logo will “debut in more than 100 matches across the biggest leagues in the world,” so expect to see the logo in the ad stands in the next few footy match you see.
EA Sports FC, as a video game, has yet to be revealed. EA will be revealing details on their brand-new label of the beautiful game later this July. Hopefully, it’s not just another rebrand of the same game.