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The Athletic strikes strategic partnership with EA Sports
When thinking about ways to get sports content in front of readers, a video game company doesn't necessarily come to mind. But the wide-ranging strategic partnership The Athletic announced with EA Sports Tuesday is fascinating on several fronts, including for how much of it revolves around the new EA Sports app. And it represents the latest out-of-the-box move for both sides. Here's more on that from a release:
Today, Electronic Arts Inc. announced a new strategic partnership between EA SPORTS, the global leader in interactive sports entertainment, and The Athletic, the world’s leader in sports journalism, to reimagine sports content for the next generation of fans worldwide in the new EA SPORTS App. Fans can now get closer to a wide range of content – including lightning-fast stats, scores and breaking news, and highlights from the world’s biggest football competitions, combined with premium editorial and video coverage from The Athletic — directly through the EA SPORTS App.
The collaboration brings together the best of both worlds - EA SPORTS’ global reach, scale, and expertise in interactive entertainment with The Athletic’s unmatched sports storytelling, insights and analysis. Content in the EA SPORTS App links to full articles on The Athletic and highlights global football competitions, NFL, and college football, alongside coverage of F1, golf, and more sports.
Highlights of the partnership include:
The Athletic written content published in the EA SPORTS App: Across global football, NFL, and college football, featuring a mix of match reports, tactical explainers, sporting insight, news updates, and opinion.
The Athletic short-form video published in the EA SPORTS App: High-performing short-form videos and social content across global football NFL, and college football from The Athletic’s Video and Audio network.
EA SPORTS App Rewards: As fans engage with The Athletic editorial and live reporting content, they’ll unlock access to EA SPORTS in-app rewards.
Of course, EA Sports has long been involved with the sports media world, particularly for in-game content. Their games have featured prominent announcers for decades, and while that takes a huge amount of work (especially for new titles; Rece Davis estimated he put in 250 hours of work and 30,000 takes for College Football '25), it's been beneficial for both increasing the immersion of gamers in the virtual sports world these games create and for increasing the prominence of the selected media figures.
One small example of this, showing my age and my Canadian background, is that the first time I ever heard of Tony Bruno was with his generated EA Sports Radio show in the "Storyline Central" part of Madden '05. Alongside the inclusion of generated copies of USA Today and fake local newspapers, it was a remarkable way to make the game feel more real:
Here's an example of how this actually looked and sounded. (It had quite the following, as this Reddit thread illustrates):
EA Sports' titles have done plenty of partnerships with sports media figures since then as well. A big part of that has been about generated in-game social media posts, but those haven't always been great. Here's an example of that from Madden '21:
But what's particularly interesting about this latest move is that in-game content is only a small part of the plan. Yes, there will be that as well, with the release mentioning "The Athletic will also be integrated in-game across other EA SPORTS properties. The platform will become a key source of football news and updates in FC 26 Career Mode, and The Athletic brand will be highly visible across EA Connect."
The larger part of this is about putting a fair bit of The Athletic's content into this new EA Sports app, though. Here are a couple of screenshots I took on that app Tuesday, showing three of the top five stories (with no signed-in account or favorite teams or players selected) from The Athletic, with the other two coming from GOAL and The Associated Press, and showing the first two paragraphs of that top story (on Jordi Alba's retirement):
It's interesting to see EA getting into the real world sports content space with this new app, as that's a ways outside of their primary focus of making games. But there's some logic to this; so far, this seems more about them licensing content from partners than creating their own content, and there's long been a lot of value to providing a digital content hub for sports news and building your brand across connected properties in the process, as the likes of Yahoo, The Score, and others have shown.
With moves like this, EA is trying to make themselves part of the real-world sports conversation. And that's building on previous moves such as their Madden altcast. There's reason to be skeptical of attempts at an "everything app," as that's gone quite poorly for the likes of X and Substack to date (and arguably hurt their performance at their core competency), and even some past EA attempts to try and push social and interactive features have gone poorly. (For example, there are many of us Bioware solo RPG fans annoyed at their various attempts to keep trying to make those games emphasize multiplayer modes.)
But the EA Sports app thus far looks like a relatively low-risk move that could reap some benefits. And tying that to gamification with app rewards has some merit. And they're also getting some additional in-game benefits from content deals like this. All in all, it looks pretty logical for them.
For The Athletic, this seems perhaps even more logical. The company has long done some interesting distribution things inside and outside of their own platforms. Those include integration with other areas of The New York Times following that publication's acquisition of them in 2022, a partnership with Google to boost their women's sports coverage, a partnership with Yahoo for a global women's sports hub, and even a daily game.
The latter is Connections: Sports Edition, and I interviewed The Athletic's managing editor for news Mark Cooper about that feature earlier this year. There, he had the key line of "When you solve the game, maybe you go deeper into the website and read a couple stories." That's unlikely to work exactly the same way with the EA Sports app, with this content syndicated there rather than hosted on The Athletic's own site, but there is a shared principle of building The Athletic as a regular brand on people's daily radar. And a partnership with EA Sports has the ability to help The Athletic reach a particular audience they may not have already been hitting regularly.
The Athletic was initially conceived as a solution to declining local sports coverage from local newspapers in particular cities. Their focus has grown and shifted a lot since then, and their digital model has helped them draw in some people who never subscribed to a print newspaper, but there's still a massive young audience in particular that has never paid for any kind of non-game sports content. But a lot of that audience is very into sports video games. Putting some of The Athletic's content into this EA Sports app isn't necessarily going to lead a high percentage of those people to instantly subscribe, but it at least gets their brand on the radar there, and may wind up prompting some subscriptions. And with a big potential audience, even a small percentage of conversion can add up.
It's also no surprise that the release and the initial stories here have a lot to do with soccer. EA has long been a global player there with their FIFA game (now EA Sports FC), and The Athletic has also long prioritized the sport, especially with their The Athletic UK hub that they launched with a massive investment and more than 40 writers in 2020. The depth of their soccer coverage remains a key differentiator for the publication. And there are maybe the greatest brand-awareness benefits to reap there; while The Athletic has some global presence, EA Sports seems to have more, and this partnership may help get the publication more in the mind of a global audience as a key soccer source.
It's impossible to completely predict how this will shake out. Companies the size of EA make plenty of big and splashy moves that they eventually go away from, so a long-term future for the EA Sports app isn't assured. (Of note, too, EA was just acquired last month by a combination of Saudi Arabia's PIF, Endeavor spin-off Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, and ownership changes often lead to focus shifts.) The Athletic has also tried plenty of things that they haven't stuck with for the long term. But there seems to be at least some potential to this partnership for both sides, and it's definitely interesting to see them test this out.
