Music and soccer, and a roundabout review of the new EA Sports FC soundtrack.
As a starting point, here’s an excellent tweet:
The joke: A certain demographic (particularly boys and men aged 13-35, but pretty much anyone who pays their yearly dues to be mad at Electronic Arts) experiences an inescapable urge to identify a song that was on a FIFA soundtrack. Waiting in line for coffee, this person hears Passion Pit’s “I’ll Be Alright” and as if compelled by primal instinct points at the speakers and says “This was on FIFA!”
It’s a funny joke — somewhat in the spirit of the whole “men have weird obsessions” Roman Empire thing — but also describes a real cultural trend: Over the past two decades, the world’s biggest soccer video game has also become perhaps the most powerful curatorial force in music. 1The actual most powerful curatorial force in music is probably the Spotify recommendation algorithms, so I guess it’s more accurate to say that the FIFA soundtracks are the most powerful curatorial force in music made by actual human beings.
Or at least a certain type of music. What fits under the “FIFA-core” umbrella has shifted over the decades, but the most straightforward definition is something like “slightly left-of-the-dial mainstream pop music.” The classic artists of the genre are the indie pop and rock darlings of the 2000s and 2010s: your Passion Pits, your Portugal The Mans2Portugals The Man? Portugal The Men?, your Clubs of both the Two Door Cinema and Bombay Bicycle variety. In the past seven or so years, the soundtracks have been rounded out by a smattering of various international genres and a certain brand of big-name-but-not-that-big name American hip-hop artists — big Latin pop and reggaeton tunes, radio-friendly Run the Jewels edits, post-Skepta grime stars, things of that nature.
The story of FIFA soundtracks as eclectic tastemakers starts in 2001, when EA hired a record label veteran named Steve Schnur to work on music for their games. Later joined by an A&R named Cybele Pettus, Schnur was tasked with curating the music for EA’s big video games.
In the not-yet-American-juggernaut FIFA series, he saw an opportunity to move away from the jock jams of yesteryear. Look up any interview with Schnur, and you’ll notice he’s fond of saying that he wanted to avoid sounding like “your parents game,” or that if he simply recreated the music of soccer stadiums we would be stuck with Queen every year. Rather than strike deals for arena rock tunes of the ‘70s, his team started acquiring music from up-and-coming indie acts. As the years went on and the tastes of their target demographics shifted, they increasingly included songs from other genres that could slot in comfortably next to the up-tempo indie faire.
Over time, the musical decisions made for the video games started to have impacts on the sound of real life soccer. John Newman’s 2013 dance tune “Love Me Again” became a runaway hit thanks in part to its inclusion on the FIFA 14 soundtrack. A decade later, it is firmly ensconced in the rotation of songs that play in commercials for soccer games on TV.
But as much as the sound of soccer has been influenced by FIFA soundtracks, those soundtracks are influenced by the game’s musical. Schnur is overlooking the fact that soccer produced a video game with an eclectic, genre-agnostic soundtrack because that’s exactly the music that has always gone with the sport.
In the United States, sports fans mostly achieve collective expression by rhythmically yelling four syllables and then clapping five times. 3“Let’s go Yan-kees”; “We want Mes-si”; “O-ver ra-ted” to name a few examples. In the rest of the world they sing — and what they sing varies widely. The music that you hear at and around soccer games is as diverse a mix as, I don’t know, a carefully constructed international pop music playlist for a major video game.
In England they serenade players to the tune of the White Stripes’ accidental meathead anthem, a Christmastime standard record by Elvis and Bing Crosby, and occasionally an 1851 Italian aria. 4“Seven Nation Army,” “Winter Wonderland,” and “La donna è mobile from Rigoletto, for inquiring minds. Two of the most popular teams in Europe sing a Rodgers and Hammerstein ballad before every game. Throughout much of the world actual musical instruments are commonplace in the stands, whether its full percussion sections in Latin America or the infamous vuvuzelas of South Africa. The world’s most annoying brass band follows England’s national team around the world. And so on.5Other favorites, from both the terraces and the speaker system: Gala’s 1997 Euro-dance totem “Freed From Desire,” most famously used to celebrate Northern Irish striker Will Griggs, the fact that multiple German teams play the “can-can” section of J.S. Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld every time they score a goal, French artist Vegedream releasing this jam which name checks every single member of the 2018 World Cup-winning France squad.
All this to say: The magic of the FIFA soundtracks is less that they stopped the sound of a sport from ossifying around dad rock and more that they bring new music into the fold of an already diverse musical culture.
The concept of the FIFA soundtrack has been on my mind lately because there will be no more FIFA soundtracks. For reasons that are frankly too boring to get into,6Long story short, global soccer bureaucrats are some of the lamest, greediest dudes on the planet, and FIFA organization managed to severely overestimate its importance to the success of FIFA the video game negotiations between Fédération internationale de football association (the organization known as FIFA) and EA broke down when their last contract expired, so the flagship soccer video game is now known as EA Sports FC. As the fist rebranded installment approached, I started wondering if it would bring any change to the soundtrack.
Much like the rest of the game, the answer is resoundingly no.
This is most certainly a FIFA7Sorry, EA FC. soundtrack — not that that’s a bad thing. There are places to nitpick (Did we need a Run the Jewels remix and a Killer Mike song? Does Jack Harlow have to be on every major playlist and/or video game soundtrack?) but for the most part, this is a perfectly enjoyable collection of songs that hit the sweet spot of being cooler than the Hot 100 without pushing the boundaries of taste far enough to be actually offputting.
Smino’s neo-Outkast jam “Pro Freak” from his excellent 2022 album is a great FIFA tune, as are Yaeji’s “For Granted” and Genesis Owusu’s “What Comes Will Come.” The Australian band Royel Otis have a song on this soundtrack called “Going Kokomo” which would sound right at home next to any of the great FIFA-core rock tunes of the 2010s.8Tangentially important, the group is also going with an artist bio in promo materials that at least got a chuckle out of me: “In the lyrical justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: The Royel, who investigate rhyme, and Otis, who prosecutes the offenders.These are their stories.” Elsewhere, Hak Baker’s update of Original Pirate Material-era The Streets is a welcome addition, as are a pretty diverse mix of dance tunes from Channel Tres, Bree Runway, and piri. The latest Baby Keem and Kendrick Lamar song is here too, maybe just because Kendrick drops a Messi/Neymar bar in the hook, but I suppose that is a good enough reason and it definitely fits the broader aesthetic.9Also worth noting that all of this is in service of a deeply flawed product, which mostly exists in order to extract $70 from several million children each fall and squeeze them for every cent in the intervening months through microtransactions. But that is a blog for someone who covers the gaming industry.
It’s a soundtrack that accomplishes its goal of identifying a good chunk of songs that you will likely hear while out and about over the next few years. If you’re having a low-key house party and you’re feeling particularly uncreative, it’s a better choice than whatever comes up when you type “low-key house party” into the streaming service of your choice. This of course presents the risk that many of the dudes present will spend the entire night identifying that each song was on a FIFA soundtrack — but hey, many of us will do that anyway.
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