FIFA teams up with ENVR to announce 5-a-side return to video games

After their very public falling out with EA, FIFA has hitched its video game wagon to another studio, ENVER, and announced FIFA Heroes. This will be a 5-a-side arcadey title releasing in 2026, and in some very amusing news, you will be able to recruit FIFA’s official mascots to your team.

There will also be fictional characters from TV and film, as well as the obvious boring real-world icons, but do they matter? When you can control World Cup Mascots like Canada’s Maple, Zayu from Mexico, or the United States’ Clutch? It's a giant bald eagle for Christ's sake, it's going to be hilarious.

Realism is being thrown away here, as players will have blistering power moves and physics-defying tricks. It reminds me of the old FIFA Street spin-offs, and they were amazing. You can take your team to the pitch in PvE action, before graduating to some breakneck PvP fun.

Now, all this is undoubtedly exciting, and I, for one, am so looking forward to seeing mascots slide-tackling people in hopefully over-the-top arcade fashion. But there is just one problem that I can’t get past. “Mascots, real people, and fictional people”, to paraphrase the line up. This feels an awful lot like gacha bait.

Let’s step back almost two decades, ouch my bones, to 2008. The very popular EA Sports FIFA series has just introduced Ultimate Team, and then proceeded to milk the wallet of every football fan until 2022. Then EA and FIFA split because FIFA got greedy, and after 14 long years, the Ultimate Team gravy boat ended. 

Even if FIFA only got a small cut of the Ultimate Team revenue, that's huge. It pulls in billions per year. Which means a big hole in FIFA’s pocket, and what better way to try and fill that than with a gacha mobile game? Maybe I am being cynical, maybe this will be a free and amazing title.

But, I won’t hold my breath.