Video game information technology platform Futbin, a third-party business orbiting the popular EA Sports FC soccer franchise, has not always gotten along with publisher Electronic Arts.
Futbin is an independent companion app for EA Sports FC’s Ultimate Team mode that offers accurate live market data on player card prices and interactive team-building visualizations, among other services. It was bought by Better Collective for a reported €105 million ($114 million) in 2022 and has tried to expand its capabilities to keep a market share edge over competitors after overtaking now-defunct rival Futhead in the 2010s.
With a reliance on EA’s intellectual property—namely data and images extracted from the popular Ultimate Team mode—Futbin and its peers were once seen as a nuisance at Redwood City, Calif., headquarters.
But EA’s icy instincts have thawed amid a scramble to stave off a user engagement decline in Ultimate Team, the company’s revenue cash cow that is coming off a holiday season hiccup. EA recently entered an official licensing agreement with Futbin involving the sharing of game data, according to Christian Sørensen, senior head of Futbin and esports strategy at Better Collective. Deeper partnerships between the parties could follow.
“I think EA are starting to wake up to see the potential in a third-party collaboration,” Sørensen said in a video interview.
In a statement, an EA spokesperson wrote, “We’re pleased to have a community fansite agreement in place with Futbin along with several other community websites, which allows them to provide data to our community of players. EA Sports FC has and will continue to keep community at the forefront of the game and supporting these community websites enables us to do this.”
During a call with analysts two weeks ago, executives said EA FC posted reassuring in-game transaction numbers for Ultimate Team between February and May because of a reengagement drive that followed its holiday dip. Still, they acknowledged this was not a smooth edition of the soccer game.
“It’s actually not unnatural for franchises of this size, this scale, and this level of enduring strength to have momentary lags from time to time, the kind of ebbs and flows of a live service business,” EA CEO Andrew Wilson said. “As we look at a lot of large-scale global franchises coming out of COVID, many of them had prolonged slowdowns at 40%, 50% of their annual revenue before kind of clawing some back, and some never really made it back to where they were. … We didn’t expect that FC would go through that, but it did.”
While EA might see Futbin as a complementary piece to its engagement strategies, the relationship is arguably far more meaningful for Futbin’s long-term survival. Futbin completely overhauled its tech stack following the Better Collective acquisition, pausing almost all product development in a process Sørensen said hampered short-term growth.
Since then, the company has tried to “create awareness around Futbin being back on track.” Working directly with EA could help Futbin reach more gamers and potentially cement its credibility relative to competitors. Futbin has a roughly 75% market share with approximately 3.5 million daily active users, the company shared.
Futbin’s ongoing marketing push includes enlisting social media influencers familiar to sports gamers to promote its product, as becoming a go-to hub for conversation is vital, Sørensen said.
As a foundation, Futbin and similar operations have long featured comment sections below Ultimate Team player profile pages. Those forums are teeming with organic interactions but historically rife with a level of trolling remarkable even by the standards of the gaming community.
Sørensen said his team is aware of the rowdy, sometimes absurd comment sections. With an official EA pact adding “a lot of responsibility” to foster a brand safe environment, he pledged stronger moderation measures. For now, the plan is to use human moderators, though he said AI tools could eventually take over the task of milling through thousands of comments from online troublemakers.
EA isn’t the only prominent organization Futbin wants to woo—there are ongoing efforts to collaborate with real-life clubs and players, particularly in non-English language markets such as Brazil that have fervent grassroots club support. This could encourage the growth of micro-communities that feel like prominent social media apps such as Discord where soccer fans congregate. In those spaces, conversations could encompass soccer topics beyond Ultimate Team.
“The main goal is making it interesting to visit the site to do something else than just check prices,” Sørensen said. “That’s a leading star for us.”
Better Collective is interested in applying the Futbin concept to other video games—even those outside of traditional sports, such as League of Legends.
Games with modes similar to EA FC’s Ultimate Team could provide a natural business extension. Better Collective sees Take-Two Interactive’s NBA 2K series as a potential fit, for example, because of the basketball game’s MyTeam mode that resembles Ultimate Team.
Take-Two and EA are direct competitors, however, so the company would need to tread carefully. After all, Futbin does not wish to jeopardize a blossoming relationship with EA that took a decade to build.
“[Our relationship] has been bad, but it’s good now, and we are looking forward,” Sørensen said.
(This story has been updated with a statement from EA Sports in the sixth paragraph.)
