For almost three decades, FIFA has shaped the musical tastes of its audience with an influence no traditional platforms can replicate.
Tracks once unfamiliar became inseparable from the game you were playing and heard so frequently and by so many that they entered football culture almost by a sort of osmosis.
Years later, a handful of opening notes can still place an entire generation inside a particular edition.
This is what EA has managed to build over the past three decades: not just a collection of very good football-game soundtracks, but a musical memory bank shared by millions, a place where Blur’s “Song 2”, Caesars’ “Jerk It Out” and Avicii’s “The Nights” will forever call home.
After all, these songs are no longer just songs – they are FIFA songs.
The newly released EA Sports FC 27 soundtrack continues that tradition on an enormous scale. Its 120 tracks span 36 countries, moving between Interpol, The Strokes and Barry Can’t Swim, alongside rising names including Sayf and Rose Gray. There’s unreleased music from Cage The Elephant and Mura Masa, too.
On paper, you could be mistaken for thinking you’re eyeing the line-up for a well-curated European music festival. Alas, this is yet more EA wizardry.
Since the beginning, FIFA’s soundtracks have never felt as though they’d been assembled by committee, even if, naturally, plenty of meetings and licensing agreements went into them.
The biggest records were often placed beside something stranger or sung in a language you didn’t understand, but liked the sound of. Sure, you’d always come for the football, but more often than not you’d leave with an inexplicably deep attachment to a Brazilian indie band you didn’t know the name of.
Point is, long before Spotify playlists began feeding listeners more of what they already liked, FIFA was forcing wildly different sounds into the same room. There was no skipping because you were too busy renegotiating a contract.
Music became bound up with the experience of playing, which is why the phrase “FIFA classic” carries weight. Seemingly, EA recognised that potential early. FIFA 98’s use of Blur helped establish the soundtrack as part of the game’s identity, but by the early 2000s the company was actively backing artists it believed were about to break.
Kings of Leon, Bloc Party, Scissor Sisters, Robyn, Disclosure and CHVRCHES all appeared while still in their early years respectively. FIFA didn’t create their careers, obviously, but it did give them access to an international audience that traditional music media couldn’t back then.
You could look at this as – in a slightly peculiar way, but bear with me – football’s answer to the NME Shockwaves Awards Tour. Not a physical journey between sticky-floored venues, but an annual selection of artists presented as the sound of what was coming next.
EA’s reach has always been difficult to overstate. The label has previously cited an audience of 200 million players and nine billion hours played and watched in a single year. That, for any young artist, means months of repeated exposure across markets that might otherwise take years to reach.
FC 27, though, pushes music further into the overall experience through The Grounds, a new social space containing districts inspired by English, French and Argentinian football culture, each carrying its own soundtrack.
Questions still linger around how artists are paid for their value and exposure remains a notoriously slippery currency. Yet few platforms can genuinely claim to turn an unknown track into a reference point shared across continents.
That is EA’s peculiar power, if you will. Not only does it predict what football might sound like over the coming year, sometimes, through sheer scale, repetition and taste, it gets to decide, too.
