Five Star Skillers and a Gold Hayley Lauder

Women's football has come to Ultimate Team and with it opening up conversations around the women's game in a community where they rarely existed before.

I am a thirty-something year old man who watches FIFA YouTubers (technically EAFC YouTubers now but calling them that is a habit that will take a wee while to break).

Residue of lockdown algorithms and the need to watch something utterly banal during a time when everything was shit, their content and the paths they lead me down have become an important tool in keeping an eye on current trends in football discourse as I hurtle towards the hauf and hauf era of my time on this earth.

When the news was announced that women’s footballers would be available as playable characters in Ultimate Team for the very first time I was curious to see how a community would react.

To call FIFA YouTube a micro-economy inside the broader landscape of the sport is to hugely undersell it. Last year 10.3m copies of FIFA 23 were sold worldwide spawning content creators who rack up hundreds of millions of views just by knowing how to do a finesse shot coupled with a McGeady spin. It can be loud and brash; eye-rolling and occasionally funny; completely unwatchable but also utterly captivating. It is, if nothing else, impossible to ignore, when looking at the growth of the game and for a brand that EA often tweak but rarely revolutionise the addition of female footballers to Ultimate Team is one of the biggest changes the game has ever seen.

In the past the likes of Arsenal, Alisha Lehmann and Carla Humphrey have featured in FIFA adjacent content that have generated millions of views for channel owners. As a pre-cursor to the arrival of female players in Ultimate Team, Swiss International Lehmann (who with 15.4m followers on Instagram is the most followed female footballer in the world), had her own personalised TIFO available to download into players Ultimate Team arenas in last season’s version of the game. It did numbers. So how has EAFC built upon FIFA 23’s early forays?

Change presents opportunity and YouTubers are business savvy creatures, knowing how to extract every drop out of the content they produce from YouTube to Shorts to X to Instagram to Reels to TikTok, by adding faces from the women’s game to that churn be it in packs, games or in real life should serve to raise visibility.