Young fans will increasingly get hooked on soccer and other sports through video games rather than attending matches, according to an EA executive.
The difficulty and cost of getting tickets for top-flight European soccer means many fans are getting their first taste of the sport through gaming, not live events, according to Monica Dinsmore, senior director of esports at Electronic Arts.
“With FC Pro and our EA FC title, it’s so closely connected to European football and it’s such a great introduction for fans in that region, especially young fans, to get exposed to the sport,” she said during an exclusive interview at CES 2025.
“If you’re a fan of [English Premier League side] Chelsea, for example, you’re never going to be able to go to a game unless you’ve had tickets over generations, and you might not be able to watch a game because it’s behind a paywall,” said Dinsmore.
“But you can engage with your favorite players, your favorite teams, as a Chelsea fan through EA FC. And you can also watch a player who represents Chelsea, who’s one of the best in the world, play the game. So, there’s a lot of different ways for you to engage.”
Reversing The Soccer Fan Trend
Traditionally, young children would be introduced to sports such as soccer by parents bringing them to games. However, Dinsmore said the opposite could soon be true.
“We’re meeting these kids where they are,” she said. “They’re playing games, they’re interacting digitally and EA is very well positioned with these sports titles to be an initial touch point. And maybe it’s the reverse, where the kids are bringing the dads down and starting to learn about a different way of becoming a fan.”
That’s not to say live sporting events are completely out of the picture for young fans. Dinsmore points to a crossover event with soccer’s European Champions League, where the esports champion was crowned the day before the Champions League final itself.
“We presented the trophy on the actual pitch to the winner of the eChampions League. So it’s a really cool crossover where I think all generations can start to feel connected however they want to consume the content.”
Watching Games Within A Game
Dinsmore said she also expects to see further blurring of the boundaries between video games and live sports worlds. For example, last December, the NFL game between the Houston Texans and the Kansas City Chiefs was streamed from inside EA’s Madden NFL game.
The stream inside the game blended elements of the video game into the coverage, with route trees, player cards and other graphical elements used during the broadcast. The event was partly conceived to introduce younger fans to the sport, in much the same way that Netflix’s Drive To Survive series has brought millions of young new fans to F1 racing.
“It was a really interesting kind of crossover that is super unique to EA,” she said. “We’re starting to see that real life versus digital crossover more and more.”
