How EA’s FUT changed football fandom forever

It used to be: one club for life. Now fans go where their favourite players go.

This is the second part of a two-part series on radical shifts in football culture. Find part one here.

Photo by Jannes Glas on Unsplash

It used to be simple.

You found a club, you fell in love, you stuck with it for life.

Maybe you passed this love on to your children, your friends, your spouse. Maybe that’s the way you found your club in the first place.

Maybe you found it elsewhere. There are a million ways people discover their club.

But they all have one thing in common.

They used to at least.

You found a club, you fell in love, you stuck with it for life.

But this type of fan is a dying breed.

Last week, I wrote about the Americanization of football. How the emotional aspect of it, the entertainment value, is being artificially inflated.

One of the reasons, that was my theory, is that traditional fandom, the fandom rooted in club football and a culture of supporting one specific team for life, is slowly but surely fading away. Forcing football officials to discover new ways of marketing their clubs and the game in general, for better or worse.

And as I pointed out last week, I definitely think: for worse.

Taking its place, especially among younger demographics, is a fandom centered around star players.

Meaning: when the player moves, the fan moves with him.

We Europeans still believe it’s weird that US clubs can move town willy-nilly. But we have somehow accepted that changing teams like underwear is the new norm for many younger fans. A trend first observed outside of Europe, but now seen everywhere among Gen Z fans especially.

This started with the Messi vs. Ronaldo rivalry.

Football is tribalism, period. And we’ve had great football rivalries before. But Messi vs. Ronaldo is arguably the biggest and most impactful dynastic competition in history.

This rivalry alone divided entire friend groups into Real Madrid and FC Barcelona.

But back in the days (my days), we would’ve stuck with either club, no matter what happened.

Not anymore.

“Sometimes Iraqis just support a person. We follow him wherever he goes”, says Jassim, a 17year old Iraqi football fan. “Like when (Lionel) Messi went to PSG, suddenly PSG became popular here.”

I think this applies globally, now.

Following Ronaldo’s transfer to Saudi, you spotted Al Nassr kits all over Vienna.

Turns out: for many fans under 30, it isn’t about the club anymore. They still build a life-long parasocial bond – but now it’s with their favourite player, not the club.

Inconceivable for me.

I’ve been an Arminia Bielefeld fan since childhood.

Fabian Klos is my all-time favourite player.

In the years before his retirement, there were rumours he might join another team. It never happened, but if it had: His new team would’ve never become my new team.

That’s not how it works for me, and that’s not how it works for most of the people my age and slightly younger or older.

For older generations of football supporters, switching club loyalty is nothing short of sacrilege. In many communities, your team is your identity; changing teams, especially due to losses or player transfers, is unthinkable.

But today’s under-30 “digital native” fans see things differently. As one observer quipped, new gen kids are more attached to individual players than clubs, similar to NBA fandom. In fact, the focus has moved significantly from supporting clubs to idolizing individual players, especially among Gen Z, who often support various teams.

This isn’t just anecdotal hearsay. A 2019 Nielsen report confirmed that Generation Z tends to focus more on individual athletes than teams or leagues, with loyalties shifting as athletes switch clubs.

The social media numbers back this up: when Ronaldo left Real Madrid for Juventus in 2018, Real lost over a million followers overnight on its social platforms, and Juventus gained millions in turn.

Likewise, after Lionel Messi’s departure from PSG in 2023, Paris Saint-Germain’s Instagram account shed about 2.8 million followers, while his new club Inter Miami’s follower count skyrocketed from under 1 million to over 10 million within weeks – making it more followed on Instagram than any NHL, MLB, or even most NFL teams.

This is a quite possibly one of the biggest shifts in football culture.

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The Legacy Opportunity: Why Football's Future Depends on Its Past

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While the Messi vs. Ronaldo saga was the spark, I believe it’s a different culprit that fanned the flames.

Another, arguably more surprising catalyst: a video game mode called FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT).

Introduced by EA Sports in 2009, FUT has fundamentally reshaped how young fans engage with football.

At its core, Ultimate Team is a virtual card-collecting fantasy league – think of it as a digital update to the old sticker albums and trading cards, but on steroids.

Players assemble their “ultimate team” by collecting virtual cards of real-life footballers – from global superstars to obscure hidden gems – and fielding them together regardless of their real-world clubs.

In doing so, the game strips away the traditional club-based structure of football and reframes it around individual players as the building blocks of success.

We’ve had manager games before, you might say. Yes, but manager games usually still had a club-centric approach at its core. While it was unrealistic that I transferred Erling Haaland and Van Dijk to Arminia Bielefeld over the course of 15 seasons, my FIFA manager save still was about Arminia Bielefeld – not Haaland.

FUT changed that narrative.

The impact of this design on fan psychology cannot be overstated. FUT has you picking and choosing players from different clubs to create a dream lineup. In the process, the player became the central unit of fandom, not the club.

A teenager grinding through FUT challenges might start salivating over obtaining a high-rated Kylian Mbappé or Kevin De Bruyne card, regardless of whether that player plays for PSG or Manchester City in real life.

The attachment formed is to the player’s stats, skills, and avatar, more so than to the badge on their jersey.

As gaming journalist Mutonga Kamau notes, “Ultimate Team has become a global sensation, influencing not only gaming culture but also football fandom”.

The mode introduces fans to players and leagues they might otherwise overlook, fostering a broader appreciation for the diversity of football talent around the world.

In other words, a gamer in Brazil might fall in love with a mid-table Bundesliga team because a striker from that club is an overpowered beast in FUT, or a player in India might become a die-hard fan of an aging Italian icon because he packed their legendary card in the game.

This blurring of virtual and real-world fandom is creating a new type of fan who discovers football through a video game and develops loyalties player-first, club-second.

Crucially, Ultimate Team’s mechanics mirror modern football’s superstar economy, not dissimilar to the influencer slash creator economy (and we see an actual crossover with monstrosities like the Baller League).

Young FUT aficionados eagerly follow how players are doing each week not necessarily to cheer on the team, but to see if their individual rating will get a boost or a special card.

The mode’s emphasis on pack openings and transfer-market trading of player cards trains fans to view players as assets with fluctuating value – a mindset not far from how many treat professional athletes in reality.

It’s telling that Ultimate Team’s virtual transfer market and its fantasy squad-building have even influenced how some fans perceive real-life transfers, instilling a more pragmatic “build the best squad” attitude rather than a romantic attachment to one club’s academy players or local heroes.

And of course, the enormous popularity of FUT (with millions of active players and over 1.7 billion matches played annually according to some reports) means its influence is pervasive.

By 2021, EA was earning over $1.6 billion a year from Ultimate Team microtransactions alone, indicating just how many people (mostly young) are deeply engaged in this mode.

These are not just trivial numbers – they represent a generation of fans whose formative football experience is through assembling squads of star players on a screen, rather than standing on terraces singing one club’s anthem.

Before FUT’s rise, a young fan’s journey into football fandom often started with a club – perhaps their local team or a famous top-division side they caught on TV. Even in my time, an individual player might’ve been the draw. A young fan might have been attracted by a star player’s brilliance – but ultimately their identity as a fan was tied to the club’s fortunes.

Ultimate Team changed that. Forever.

The game’s very structure encourages fans to sample a bit of everything – one week you might play with a front three of Mbappé-Neymar-Ronaldo (spanning three clubs and two leagues), the next week you pack a Mohammed Salah and swap him in for Neymar, bringing a Liverpool star into your virtual XI alongside a Real Madrid midfielder and a Bayern Munich defender.

This experience conditions fans to be omnivorous in their football tastes – loyalty in the game is not to a club, but to the evolving roster of your own making.

It’s a subtle but powerful shift: whereas older fans would dream in terms of “my team needs a better left-back next season,” a FUT-trained fan is more likely to think “I need that left-back, and I’ll plug him in alongside my other favourites.”

The club allegiance becomes secondary to the player collection.

It’s no surprise, then, that in the real world we now see behaviors reminiscent of the FUT ethos. Young fans increasingly treat football fandom like maintaining an all-star lineup: they may start the season with one “ultimate team” of favourite players to follow, and by next transfer window, that lineup – and the jerseys in their closet – may change.

This has been reflected in social media, especially Twitter, where many fans change their PFP and profile name to a player and “PlayernameSZN” – every season.

This represents a profound generational departure from the club-first loyalty model. The ripple effects are visible across the football world.

Clubs with global superstars gain outsized international followings that evaporate when those stars depart.

On the flip side, smaller or previously obscure clubs can gain instant global attention by signing a big name – Al-Nassr being a case in point, as it went from unknown to trending globally thanks to one player.

The FIFA Ultimate Team generation of fans has essentially, for want of a better word, democratized fandom across clubs, willing to jump to any team that has the player they adore, be it a European powerhouse or a mid-table club in an entirely new league.

Is this inherently bad?

From a fan perspective: Depends who you ask.

I, for one, don’t like it. I mean, I get it. In Formula 1 or Tour de France, I’m athlete-centric, too. But in football? No. Never. Club for life.

And for me, that’s essential, even the heart of football culture.

But behaviour changes, and like it or not, this is how it seems to be now. While it’s a matter of taste for fans, it definitely poses a challenge for clubs.

Which brings us full circle from last week’s piece.

Clubs and the football establishment are taking notice.

Many clubs have adapted their marketing and content to this player-centric reality, putting star players at the forefront of outreach.

As one sports marketing expert observed, clubs today “must adapt their strategies to place athletes at the heart of everything they do,” leveraging players’ personal platforms and popularity to engage fans.

It’s no coincidence that we see behind-the-scenes documentaries (Amazon’s All or Nothing, etc.) and social media videos focusing on players’ personalities – the industry knows that young fans connect with human stories and star personas more than abstract club legacies.

In a way, clubs are now competing in the marketplace of personalities: having a globally marketable star can translate to millions of new “followers” (if not traditional fans) who might buy merchandise and boost the club’s brand value, at least as long as that player wears the shirt.

We’ve essentially entered the era of free-agent fandom, and EA’s Ultimate Team was arguably the training ground that made it possible.

Clubs will have to find a way to engage with this new breed of fan. But I highly doubt that turning it into the WWE will actually help.

Is there a place in football for traditional fans like myself 10, 20, 30 years from now?

I am not sure, to be honest. But as I mentioned last week, there are alternatives.

Maybe the highly commercialized, sanitized and artificially scripted world of global football aka Premier League, UCL etc. is not my place.

Maybe my place will be somewhere else long-term.

But as we look to the future, one thing is clear: the Ultimate Team generation isn’t content to be tied down to one club’s fortunes (lucky them, I guess).

They prefer to chase greatness wherever it goes – and in doing so, they have transformed soccer fandom.

Like it or not, EA’s FIFA Ultimate Team has helped raise a new breed of supporter for whom football isn’t just about loyalty to the club, but loyalty to the game’s biggest names.

And that has changed the game of fandom, well, ultimately, forever.