Fifa believes it can make great sims without EA – but it should heed the fate of Championship Manager

The story of Eidos's cult football management sim shows the limits of brand recognition - and suggests Fifa would have been better off sticking with Electronic Arts

They think it's all over ... it is now. The lucrative corporate marriage that brought us 30 years of annual football simulations, and made billions of dollars in the process, is now defunct. Fifa and Electronic Arts (EA) have parted ways. And now the dust has settled on a day of frantic press releases, hype and guarded interviews, what sort of challenges face both entities as they jostle to reclaim the future of the footie sim for themselves?

Here's my pretty safe bet: Fifa is going to have a tough time of it. Now freed from the exclusivity clause granted to EA, the company apparently has a range of non-simulation" games due out this year from various developers. It's likely these will be casual titles, probably for smartphones, crammed with micro-transactions and perhaps aimed at the huge Asian market for arena-based multiplayer games. If there's a plausible Fifa: Clash of Teams game, perhaps with some NFTs thrown in, you can bet someone is working on it.