There’s no promo this week in FIFA Ultimate Team. Nothing. In a game that relies on enticing you back with better rewards each week to keep you in its grindy gameplay loop, this is practically unprecedented. We’ve got a “Team of the Year Warmup” – as if that’s a meaningful collection of words and not a big pair of hairy bollocks with a facelift – as we count down to the biggest promotion so far this season.
It’s not like there’s anything else going on in football at the moment, right? Not like there’s an international competition happening in the second-largest continent on the planet by both area and population? And it’s not like I simulated the results of said tournament on Football Manager and ended up supporting Comoros? Oh wait – we forgot about AFCON!
One little promo is all I’m asking for, EA. To celebrate a competition of great enormity, and one that I’m very much enjoying watching. But between Sky’s barebones coverage and the fact the official YouTube streams of the tournament keep getting taken down for copyright infringement, I wish people were paying more attention to this exciting competition.
Some of the best players in the world are playing! Mohammed Salah who, even if he was snubbed at the Ballon d’Or last year, is probably the best player in the world right now is trying to carry his nation on his back. Edouard Mendy, who was also drastically overlooked during awards season, is pushing Manchester City’s Ederson for the title as the best goalkeeper in the Premier League as he represents Senegal alongside the likes of Sadio Mané and Kalidou Koulibaly.
Now I’ve reminded you that this tournament is as big as the Euros that we all avidly watched last year, why isn’t there a promo in FIFA in this week of nothingness? They had an excuse for the Euros – PES owns the rights – but as far as I can tell, nobody owns the rights to make AFCON video games or put the competition into their video games?
Imagine a promo with the best players from AFCON all featured: Salah, Mane, Mendy, Koulibaly, Aubamayang, Mahrez, Hakimi, Kessie, Osimhen, Anguissa, Tapsoba – the list goes on. You could include some young stars like Spurs’ Pape Matar Sarr or Rennes’ Kamaldeen Sulemana, or rogue picks like Bayern Munich’s Eric Choupo-Moting, who could become a FIFA classic with the right card.
Slap on a swish card design and grant the players boosts if their team makes it out of the group stages and you’ve got yourselves a promo. Some of those cards (I’m looking at Mane, Tapsoba, and Aubamayang in particular) could be meta-defining, or a focus on young stars could give lesser-used players a chance to shine.
The other impact of running an AFCON-themed promo would be putting more eyes on the games themselves. If you need Salah to progress to the knockout stages to get a little boost on your card, then you might be more likely to tune into Egypt v Sudan. If you’ve followed the tournament through FIFA cards for its duration, you might just check out the final even if you weren’t planning on it before. And if you did, you’d learn about how wonderful a tournament it is, and how much fun you can have just turning on the telly and choosing to support whichever side is losing, or becoming a Comoros fan for the month. Or both, which unfortunately seems to be the case more often than not.
I know it’s not just as simple as ‘doing a promo’ – the rights will take months of complications and negotiations – but when AFCON next comes around, I want to see something. Add a Friendly mode where you can only use African players. Drop Didier Drogba and Samuel Eto’o SBCs. Anything. Just acknowledge that there’s football going on right now.
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