La Liga, Spain’s top flight of professional football and home to some of the world’s biggest clubs—like Barcelona and Real Madrid—has signed a new sponsorship deal that sees its previous branding (“La Liga Santander”) swapped out, with the league now to be known as LALIGA EA SPORTS.
Please note the caps is their idea, not mine. It’s presumably part of EA’s big push to get people ready for this year’s FIFA EA Sports FC video game, which will play the same as last year’s edition but will be the first to not be able to rely on decades-old brand recognition.
Which is all well and good for everyone involved, I’m sure hands have been shaken and money exchanged, but this isn’t a business press release website. I don’t really care what the top flight is called, and EA Sports have been sponsoring big european football leagues for years in one way or another (they’ve got multiple deals with the Premier League, for example, including appearing on referee’s uniforms).
No, I’m here to talk to you about the second division’s rebrand. Known either as La Liga 2 or Segunda División, depending on where you’re from, it’ll now be called (again, their caps, not mine) LALIGA HYPERMOTION.
Hypermotion, for those who haven’t had to read the bullet points of sports game press releases for the past few years, is a system EA cooked up to try and sell FIFA where they combined 11v11 motion capture with machine learning to try and improve the physics and animation of the players in the game.
That’s what a whole league is now named after. Not a video game company, not even a video game, just a physics and animation system designed for a single video game series where the benefits it brings are negligible at best (it’s mostly just empty PR calories, FIFA hasn’t fundamentally changed the way it plays or looks for years).
Of course nobody on the streets will actually call it that, everyone will still just call it La Liga 2 or whatever they’ve been calling it forever, but still. I’m very much looking forward to EA expanding these types of sponsorships, when next season’s Championship will be renamed to THE FROSTBITE LEAGUE.