Some of my friends play 'EA Sports FC'. I have never asked them which version, and none of them has ever asked me which Super Mario power-up is my all-time favourite. The arrangement has held for years, and we are happier for it.
I am writing about football today because Electronic Arts is about to be owned by Saudi Arabia. Sort of. EA’s $55 billion sale to a consortium led by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) cleared its shareholder vote in December 2025, and is now in regulatory review with a closing window of mid-2026. The PIF is bringing Silver Lake and Jared Kushner’s firm Affinity Partners along for company, and the fund itself is chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is widely believed to have ordered the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. JPMorgan is fronting $20 billion of the deal as debt, which makes it the largest leveraged buyout in history. None of this is conspiracy theory; it was on Bloomberg in December.
Watching football is, for me, less interesting than watching paint dry. But I respect that for a very large number of people — including the 12 million who bought 'EA Sports FC 26' in its first month, including the players who made it the best-selling game of 2025 in 16 of 17 European countries — football is a real and serious cultural object, and the digital simulation of football is part of how that object lives in the world. 'EA Sports FC' is the football game, and Saudi Arabia is often a top-three market for it on PlayStation; the PIF is paying a great deal of money to acquire the company it is already one of the largest customers of.
The PIF has been busy outside videogames. It bought Newcastle United in 2021 and turned the club into a competitive Premier League outfit through the simple mechanism of having infinite money. It runs the Saudi Pro League, which has spent the last three years convincing Ronaldo, Neymar and Mané to play out their thirties in Riyadh. The fund bankrolls LIV Golf, owns the esports companies ESL and FACEIT outright, bought the mobile-games publisher Scopely, and holds a minority stake in Nintendo for good measure.
Sportswashing was a respectable argument about a football club, and it held up about a football league. The golf tour stretched it. A videogame is something else again. Newcastle fans love Newcastle. 'EA Sports FC' players, from my admittedly outsider seat, do not love EA. They tolerate EA the way you tolerate the only landlord on the block.
Which is what makes the deal so calm. The PIF is acquiring the landlord position; affection wasn’t on the menu, and they aren’t pretending otherwise. The game my friend launches next September will be issued by the people who run the league that Ronaldo plays in, owned by the fund that owns the Premier League club my other friend supports. The loop closes. The same buttons get pressed every September, and the same Belgian centre-back will still be slightly worse than he should be. Nothing on the screen will change.
That is what makes it a good deal, from the buyer’s perspective. The thing you are acquiring keeps doing exactly what it always did, and the people who use it have no reason to notice anything has shifted underneath. My friends will keep playing, and I will keep not playing. The man widely believed to have ordered Khashoggi’s murder in 2018 will, going forward, also be in the credits of 'EA Sports FC 27'.
