Just this past week, EA took a giant step in promoting gender equality by adding women into FIFA 16. This will be the first time ever that a female is featured in the FIFA franchise or any sort of sports game for that matter. Now although that seems like a giant leap for our society as a whole, EA is receiving a huge amount of backlash on their decision to include the women’s national teams.
With this controversy, it still seems like half of the world is still trying to hold onto the fact that women should not be fooling around with soccer on the professional level. The angry tweets directed at EA looked like they belonged in the comment sections of a YouTube channel, with some fans going as far to say that they will not be purchasing FIFA 16.
No women should be over than 55 ratings in FIFA 16.
— Alex Guerrero (@AlexGuerr93) May 28, 2015
With women in FIFA 16, will they have a new celebration where you make a sandwich?
— James Wyllie (@JamesWyllie9) May 28, 2015
FIFA 16 women’s teams are gunna be one star. That’s the best one.
— David Millington (@DavidMilling93) May 28, 2015
It seems like the battle for gender equality is still a struggle, with even the president of FIFA, Sep Blatter making comments like, “Let the women play in more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball”. With that said, this is an inspiring message delivered from EA, as a father commented on Reddit stating that his daughter was so excited to play with the U.S Women’s National Team.
It isn’t that hard to spot these two things in the world anymore; a woman playing video games, and a woman playing soccer. EA is doing a great job of representing both sides of the equation in a world where you don’t see many video games or movies having a woman protagonist at all. Maybe our faith in humanity hasn’t been completely restored yet, but with the FIFA franchise, EA is doing a great job of building up the puzzle, piece by piece.
