The world of licensing in sports franchises is a critical consideration, as fans simply prefer playing games with official branding and real-world players. Some excellent franchises, even ones generally considered to have won the competition to create the best game engine, have come undone by not securing the right licenses.
To that end, fans were excited at the potential to see Liga MX come to EA Sports FC 26 only to be disappointed. Here’s what happened:
How Does Licensing Work For International Football Games?
Getting the rights to produce a game like EA FC is a little bit more challenging than producing a game for one of the United States’ “big four” leagues due to the broad reach of the sport. While creating a game about American football only requires developers to come to an agreement with the respective unions and organizations in that one league, international football games like EA Sports FC require significantly more negotiating.
Every league that gets included in a soccer title has to be individually negotiated with the associated regulatory bodies and players associations. This is why for many years players would be able to take their top sides into European competition but not under any of the official branding of the Champions and Europa Leagues.
As EA gains and loses licensing agreements from edition to edition, the clubs eligible for inclusion, and the leagues you can choose to play in, change from year to year accordingly as well.
Does eFootball Still Control The Exclusive Rights To Liga MX?
For a long time, the holdup for Liga MX in EA Sports FC titles was that the league rights belonged to rival Konami and its eFootball franchise. Because it was an exclusive agreement, that meant that EA was not free to attempt to negotiate and reach terms with Liga MX, its clubs, players, and other representative groups. Inclusion in the EA games was a complete non-starter.
Fans got accordingly excited about the revelation that the exclusive license for eFootball was set to expire. With EA now free to negotiate with the league fans speculated that Liga MX would be coming to EA Sports FC 26 to such a degree that some players even began to think it was a formal announcement of an agreement, which there never was. When EA Sports FC 26 launched earlier this year, the Mexican league was still nowhere to be found.
Then Why Isn’t Liga MX in EA FC 26?
The answer is still licensing, just not on the level of the entire league this time. While many of the leagues around the world operate and sell rights collectively, meaning that an organization reaching an agreement with the Premier League could include all teams and league branding for example, this is not uniformly true.
Just as some athletes have famously opted out of players unions and not appeared in otherwise-official games, some clubs have independent negotiating rights. Unfortunately for fans of Mexican clubs looking to play them in their video game, this includes Mexican sides Club America, Chivas, Pumas and Tigres. These clubs have their own negotiation rights and each still holds an exclusive agreement with Konami and eFootball.
What this means is that while EA would have been in position to negotiate with Liga MX to gain rights to all associated branding and licensing, they would not have automatically gained the ability to fully represent the league. This is further complicated by the fact that the clubs with individual power, as is so often the case in structures like this, are also the biggest and most popular clubs in Liga MX.
With the developer unable to come to an agreement that would have allowed them to use the largest sides in Liga MX in the game, it did not make sense to bring the league over and have it in play as a half-official system where the biggest sides are represented by generic branded versions of the most famous clubs in the league.
Although it’s possible for negotiations to reach a point where a future release or update could be possible to add to the Mexican league, at this point, it seems highly unlikely. Instead, fans are left waiting another year in the hopes that EA Sports FC 27 is finally the time they can take over for Mexico’s giants on the virtual pitch.
