EA Sports, a school and professional sports video game giant, will offer school soccer players $600 to appear in its upcoming EA Sports game “College Football 25,” the first time student-athletes will take advantage of its name, symbol and likeness to what it looks like in a video game.
More than 11,300 school football players eligible to appear on EA’s “College Football 25” will also get a copy of the game, valued at $70, if they participate.
Up to 85 school football players from 134 Division 1 schools featured in the game will appear first on their rosters for their teams in the game, which is reportedly slated for a July release date.
If athletes remain in the game for multiple editions, they will be paid a year to have their names featured, ESPN reported.
Shares of Electronic Arts were up more than 1% on the day, hitting a one-week high of about $143, just below its all-time high.
College athletes are slowly getting greater advantages in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in NCAA v. Alston, which said the school athletic association’s previous regulations restricting education-based pay violated federal antitrust law. Since 2021, student-athletes have also been able to capitalize on their calling after the NCAA voted just weeks after the Supreme Court’s ruling to allow them to make cash from their calling, symbol, and likeness, breaking school sports’ long-standing culture of amateurism. In keeping with this philosophy, the NCAA had argued that school athletes deserve not to be paid for their performance, but compete on behalf of their school. The NCAA’s resolution to allow players to take advantage of their calling, symbol and likeness has since led to lucrative partnerships between athletes and brands, even though schools still can’t pay their athletes directly.
Earlier this month, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling, the first of its kind, allowing members of Dartmouth College’s men’s basketball team to unionize. In that decision, the NLRB asserted that the Ivy League school “has the right to the paintings made” through the men’s basketball team and that its players can be considered employees.
In 2022, tech giant Amazon, in a possible bid to compete more in the burgeoning video game space, reportedly tried to buy EA, USA Today reported, prompting a brief rally in EA stock. Amazon later rejected the data and made no offer for the company.
Dartmouth’s basketball players are school workers and can form the first union of its kind, according to NLRB rules (Forbes)