Women’s football around the world is growing at an amazing rate, and the evidence is everywhere. UEFA increased women's football funding by 50 percent and FIFA is undertaking a global initiative to increase women’s participation. FIFA 19 made franchise history by including its first ever fictional female playable hero, Kim Hunter, in The Journey: Champions*. Learn more about the creation of Kim Hunter and EA’s inclusion of women in FIFA 19 from Senior Game Designer, Katie Scott.

In The Beginning

FIFA's development team had a strong focus on accurately representing women when developing The Journey trilogy.

“From the very beginning, when we started thinking about telling a story in FIFA, we wanted to have diverse representation,” Scott said. “I heard it from our Narrative Director Matt Turner like this: ‘In the quest to tell a true story, we made that choice to be diverse, because it was just simply true.’”

The Journey started in FIFA 17 and revolves around the fictional Alex Hunter. Born to a white father and a black mother, the biracial Hunter fought to carve a place for himself in the English Premier League. While doing so, Hunter grappled with the shadow of his former pro father who left his family.

Concept exploration for Catherine Hunter, Alex Hunter’s mother

The Test

While the team had already been off to a solid start with their work on inclusion in The Journey, a visit from Disney made Scott realize just how much more they could be doing. 

“[Julie Ann Crommett] did a talk at our studio early last year. She spoke about these times in her career where she’d taken a look at at a movie or a TV show through the lens of diversity and found major problems,” Scott said. “They would have a TV show that had a female main character. But in the background of scenes, there wasn’t another woman to be seen.”

The idea of tracking where and how women are featured in media was recently popularized through the Bechdel Test. The rules of the test are as follows:

1. There must be at least 2 female characters
2. These two characters must talk to each other
3. The subject of the conversation must be about something besides a man

Frameworks that serve to improve representation like the Bechdel Test are important to the FIFA team. Diversity and Inclusion has grown to be a key factor the team considers in their design process for a myriad of reasons; media has the power to help people see others outside themselves. There is also the case of the EA SPORTS tagline: “It’s In The Game.” Women are playing soccer in the real world, and all EA SPORTS franchises strive to depict the state of the game as accurately as possible.