EA Sports started as a pretend TV network and became a gaming empire
EA Sports began as a marketing trick: Electronic Arts dressed its games up as broadcasts from an imaginary EA Sports Network. The pose stuck, the label grew into Madden, NHL and the football series now called EA Sports FC, and the voice behind its famous slogan was never paid.
The fake network idea, mimicking real sports channels, soon turned into a label of its own. For years every game opened with a short clip in which Andrew Anthony announced the motto It's in the game, a promise to simulate each sport as faithfully as possible. Anthony did it as a favour to a friend and received nothing. Most titles come from EA Vancouver, in Burnaby, British Columbia, and EA Orlando, formerly Tiburon Studios.
Rather than tie itself to one console, EA Sports keeps releasing for whatever machines people still own, sometimes long after rivals move on; its 1998 editions of FIFA, Madden, NBA Live and NHL came out for the ageing Sega Genesis and Super NES. Its main competitor is 2K Sports, which it fought for years over basketball, while Konami's eFootball challenges it in soccer.
Licences are the core of the business. EA signed an exclusive five-year deal with the NFL and its players' union in December 2004, later extended repeatedly, and in 2005 won sole rights to college football games. It lost Major League Baseball to 2K the same year and later handed the PGA Tour licence to 2K too, after 25 years of golf games. A 2014 court ruling that college athletes could control use of their likenesses made its NCAA games harder to license, so its planned return to college football licensed teams, uniforms and stadiums instead. Its long football series relied on the FIFA name plus more than 300 separate deals with leagues and clubs.
In 2023 EA split EA Sports into its own division under Cam Weber. Its parent was then taken private in a 55 billion dollar leveraged buyout, completed on 4 August 2026.
Source: EA Sports
