EA tries new tech to tackle FIFA 21 racism issue

While EA has issued over 25,000 warnings and suspensions, and banned over 9,000 accounts for “inappropriate or offensive content” since the launch of FIFA 21 Last year it may shock you to learn that the game still has an issue with racist whites using certain systems and game modes to act like jerks.

As this Eurogamer the investigation reveals, while a lot of our attention (and EA’s, presumably) goes to regular multiplayer, From FIFA Ultimate Team’s flagship, low-profile Pro Clubs mode is “riddled with racism” and has been for over a decade.

Some examples include:

Racist players, using the “joke defense”, abused the commenting system to, for example, set their player’s comment name to “banana” in order to nickname black players with that term. Some players would also change the name of their player commentary to “negro” (using footballers whose last name is Negro), or “Khune” (using the comment from Itumeleng Khune, the South African goalkeeper of the game. Kaizer Chiefs FC), to offend. Players have also reported encountering racist caricatures through personalized player faces.

Part of the problem here is that the Pro Clubs mode, which allows users to create a player and / or a team and participate in 11v11 online games, does not make its reporting systems clear to players.

In response to Eurogamer report, EA states that “smarter monitoring and mitigation technology” will be “released in the coming months,” although the effectiveness of this technology against some of the tactics highlighted above remains to be proven.

You can read more about EA’s survey and response, in Eurogamer history.