EA Sports College Football Facing Licensing Issues

The last couple weeks have been filled with news about various organizations and groups being unhappy with EA and how it’s handling the NIL licensing process. That unhappiness went up another level yesterday with a report from Amanda Christovich at Front Office Sports and detailed breakdown by Matt Brown over at Extra Points (subscribe to this man, he’s the source for all the nitty gritty surrounding this licensing process in general) detailing why The Brandr Group is suing EA.

We’re not going to go through every reason why The Brandr Group is suing EA, and why the College Football Players Association is boycotting EA Sports College Football because I think Extra Points is your best source to read about all the nuances, but I do want to point out a couple high-level things as it relates to the game itself because I know that’s what folks care about the most here. So the big thing is as of now there’s no real major reason to think this is going to delay EA Sports College Football. The 2024 release date still seems very much in play, and this lawsuit itself doesn’t seem like a “bombshell” in the way some of the old ones that ended up finishing off college video games.

In short, it seems like everyone still wants this game to come out, it’s just that every side is trying to maneuver for the best possible deals and really carve out specific niches because of what it could mean for future games and opportunities down the line.

As for this lawsuit, Brandr just wants EA to stop trying to go around them (Brandr represents big schools like Ohio State, Florida, and Michigan) to try and get the athletes to sign deals to be in the game. EA said they would work with Brandr, but now Brandr is saying EA has gone with another company (OneTeam Partners) and so that’s the issue at hand. With no strong union yet in place for college football athletes, basically there are a lot of splintered groups, plus the athletes themselves, all in this same bucket and so everyone is trying to figure out the protocol for something as big as EA Sports College Football. It doesn’t seem like any one group is trying to get rich off the deal or squeeze EA for extra money “just because” since the licensing by default is going to be very spread out when you’re trying to get every college football team/player into your game.

But, again, it seems like nobody wants EA Sports College Football to be a generic game with generic players and teams. These groups seem to just want to make EA go through a specific process rather than EA defining how the process should go as this is not just about EA, it’s about other big companies who start to try and put these large groups of college athletes together for big projects like this rather than specific individuals. In other words, this is likely more a battle about defining a “template” of sorts for how future games/projects should go since we’re still in this new territory for how to make college products that include paying the athletes.