Football and Video Games: When a Club's Identity Becomes a Time-Limited Licence

A Data File With the Wrong Label

Autumn in Busan is always long. That night a file landed on my machine tagged football. I opened it, read for seven minutes, then started again from the top. It was an interview with Miles Tost, level design lead at CD Projekt Red, about how the studio handles crossover content between games: The Witcher, Cyberpunk, Diablo 4, Overwatch, and the announcements made around BlizzCon. Not one club. Not one player. Not one competition. Not one dollar belonging to football.

I did not delete the file. I marked it out of scope and logged the reason, because I learned that lesson in 2026, when a rumour about internal unrest at Busan Daewoo Royals set the whole newsroom on edge and I spent three days verifying through team staff, an assistant coach and an unnamed substitute before printing a single line. The rumour turned out to be the echo of an ordinary tense training session; the team won the play-off 2-0 and stayed up. The ball does not lie, but the person holding the pen can. A wrong label in a data pipeline does not damage a match, but it damages the truth, and it does so quietly: nobody rechecks the label, readers simply trust it.

The file was still worth reading, because it describes a business model football has copied almost intact. One rights holder, one platform that wants exclusivity, one buyer in the middle who believes he is buying a product. Only the nouns change: here it is a hoodie and a card set, in football it is a club crest on a loading screen.

Where the Money Actually Runs

Football sells its identity on three tiers. The first is the simulation licence: league names, club names, player names, stadiums and kits placed inside a game sold annually. The second is brand presence inside entertainment worlds that are not football, where a club becomes a decorative object in someone else's game. The third is physical goods: shirts, cards, figurines, and product sets sold in one place only.

The biggest milestone on the first tier happened more than three years ago. FIFA 23, released on 30 September 2026, was Electronic Arts' final title carrying the FIFA name. EA Sports FC 24 arrived on 29 September 2026, and the annual cycle continued with the same pool of buyers. International press, including The New York Times in October 2026, reported that FIFA wanted around 250 million USD per year for the new licence cycle, roughly double the estimated 150 million USD per year EA had been paying, with a four-year cycle worth more than a billion USD. Those are press figures, not audited numbers, so I record them with exactly that caveat attached.

What matters is not who was right in the negotiating room. It is this: a three-letter name is worth as much as the combined revenue of three mid-table clubs, and that name does not run, pass or score.

The other side of the market has moved too. Konami shifted eFootball to a free-to-play model from 2026, meaning revenue no longer comes from selling discs but from selling time and patience. When revenue changes nature, the licence changes role: it stops being a feature that sells hardware and becomes bait that keeps users inside an ecosystem. That is why exclusive club deals became more aggressive from 2026 onwards.

I still keep the statistical notebook I started in 2026, when I left the radio desk in Busan to follow Daewoo Royals. Back then a club had two data sources: the match sheet and the human eye. Today every club has dozens of data streams, yet the cash from video-game licensing almost never appears as its own line in any report I have read. It is blended into commercial revenue, next to sponsorship, next to shirt sales. Behind every number is a person; I do not write until I have heard their story. On game licensing, nobody has told me that story yet.

The Name That Was Swapped

In 2026 Juventus signed an exclusive agreement with Konami. The consequence appeared immediately inside a rival game: from FIFA 20, the Turin club walked out under the name Piemonte Calcio, without the real crest, without the real stadium. A club with 36 domestic titles suddenly became an anonymous string of letters inside the industry's best-selling game.

That moment belongs in the history of football commerce, because it shows exactly what was being sold. Not players, not tactics, not the memory of European nights. What was sold is a string of characters that can be printed on a screen, and the contract said that string could only be printed in one place.

I have sat in the stands in Busan watching children in European club shirts argue about a player's in-game rating before knowing which flank he plays. That is not a moral question, and not a cultural one. It is a distribution-channel question. For a twelve-year-old in Busan, the first interface with Juventus may well be a game menu, not a match at three in the morning.

If the first interface is a game menu, then a club's absence from one platform is not a minor detail. It is a lost doorway. And the club receives no report on the doorways it lost, only a fixed sum.

This mechanism has precedents in quieter places. Exclusive kit deals, exclusive boot deals, exclusive drinks inside the dressing room. Football has lived on exclusivity for forty years and called it sponsorship. Game licensing is simply a copy of that model under a new name, with one important difference: a sponsor pays to appear, a platform pays so that a rival disappears.

Who Holds the Fan's Interface

CD Projekt Red told The Express Tribune it does not want content that exists purely as an exclusive depending on where the player buys, while acknowledging that physical exclusives have existed before, such as a hoodie made only for Xbox and an exclusive card set for Xbox pre-orders of The Witcher 3. The studio has also announced links between separate worlds: a Geralt-inspired Barbarian skin coming to Diablo 4, and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners outfits heading to Overwatch next year. Its representative added that the studio will listen to the feedback from the BlizzCon announcements, and that it is not of a mindset where one approach is locked in forever.

That structure differs fundamentally from the one football uses, and the difference lies in who owns the underlying asset. CD Projekt Red owns Geralt outright, owns Cyberpunk, and runs its own storefront. When you own both the bridge and the toll booth, you can let others cross free. A football club owns its crest and its name, but the crest only has value inside a league, a broadcast channel and a competitive system the club does not control. A club has no storefront of its own where it can sell a substitute experience. That is why a club finds it harder than a game studio to turn down exclusivity money.

The identity of a club is being packaged into a time-limited licence, and in most financial reports I have read, that money is not broken out for anyone to measure where it went.

There is one parallel I cannot skip, because it sits squarely in my field. The argument over VAR did not disappear when the technology arrived; it moved from the pitch to the review room and the grey zones of the law. The argument over exclusive content behaves the same way. It did not disappear when content went digital; it moved from the disc counter to the platform menu, where the rules are written by the hardware seller. Numbers tell part of the story; the rest sits inside mud-stained boots. In this story, the mud-stained boots belong to a child in Busan who has no idea the crest on his screen was just signed to a four-year deal.

The Paradox of Exclusivity

The instinctive reaction is to call content exclusivity a betrayal of fans. I do not follow that instinct, because it leads to a conclusion nobody can verify.

Exclusivity is what makes the price of a licence discoverable. When two parties want the same asset, the asset has a price. If every platform could use a crest for the same fee, the licensing market collapses into a flat rate card, and the club loses all leverage at the next renewal. That does not make exclusivity good for fans. It only means exclusivity is good for the seller, and in football the seller and the fan are not the same party.

The other side has its own suspicious paradox. A studio that refuses digital exclusivity still has to sell product elsewhere to fund that position. CD Projekt Red can afford it thanks to revenue from its own titles and a distribution platform it controls. No European football club has an equivalent structure, unless you count academies and media rights, both constrained by collective league agreements. In other words, the studio's openness is a conditional decision, not a moral principle. When conditions change, the statement changes, and the studio's own representative admitted as much by saying the approach is not fixed forever.

The real blind spot lies elsewhere. Nobody has published whether Juventus's 2026 exclusive deal with Konami raised or lowered the club's brand awareness among people aged twelve to twenty-four. Nobody has published whether shirt sales in Asia correlate with a club being renamed inside a game. We argue about exclusivity by feeling, not by data. For a man who has held a pen for forty years, that is the worst kind of argument: the loudest voice wins, and no match is held accountable for the result.

The mislabelling I ran into at the start of this piece belongs to the same illness. A data pipeline classifies documents by keyword, not by content. A piece about a game studio's platform policy lands in the football drawer simply because the word crossover appears in it. Had I accepted the label and written a football analysis from it, I would have produced a document with no foundation at all: perfectly fluent, and entirely wrong. News can wait, but the truth must never be postponed. And sometimes not postponing means stopping, marking a file out of scope, and only then writing.

Signals to Watch

Based on my experience following matches and transfer windows, three signals will show where this story goes, and all three can be observed without inside sources.

The first is disclosure structure. When a club begins breaking video-game licensing into its own line in the annual report, that is a sign the money is large enough for the board to explain. Until then, any analysis of whether exclusivity works remains speculation.

The second is how leagues sell rights. Television went collective long ago; game licensing is still largely sold club by club. If a major league moves to a collective game-licensing package, power shifts from clubs to the organiser, and the exclusivity story changes shape entirely.

The third is platform attitude. If a major publisher accepts non-exclusive club licences, believing broad presence is worth more than a rival's absence, the model flips. There is no such signal as I write this, and I will say so plainly if that changes.

A screen cannot replace a pitch; forty years holding a pen, and I still keep that rule. But the screen has become the first place a child meets a club, and if the next generation learns the crest before it learns the roar, then sports writers need to read the contract sheet as closely as the score sheet. The question I leave for next season: if a club cannot measure what it just sold, what exactly does the buyer own?