Why Juventus Streamed its Pre-Season Matches on EA Sports 📲

Hello and welcome to the Sports Pundit Newsletter,

This week I’m taking a look at the past fortnight of news. I was able to get a podcast out during my trip to Como (and recorded one that will be out soon), but I did miss publishing this newsletter. Hopefully you can forgive me, it is August after all.

FIFA’s very public dance with private equity is getting plenty of coverage from the mainstream press, but, as tends to be the case with these newsletters, I wanted to dive into something that caught my curiosity and hadn’t received quite as much attention elsewhere.

Here’s what’s coming up:

• Juventus Stream Pre-Season Fixtures on EA Sports FC Mobile 📲

• Revolut becomes Front-of-Shirt Partner at Como 1907

• WSL’s League Cup Becomes Players Cup to Reflect New Format

Let’s get into it!

IT’S IN THE GAME

Last week Juventus cruised to a 2-0 victory over OGC Nice in a pre-season friendly at their training ground. While this is largely unremarkable, what made the fixture interesting is where they chose to stream it.

• For the first time, supporters were able to watch the Bianconeri live on EA SPORTS FC Mobile.

• The club also plans to stream their upcoming traditional in-house clash against Juventus Next Gen at the Allianz Stadium on the platform. Taking place on the 17th August, this will be the second of two fixtures in this joint experiment.

• EA SPORTS is one of Juventus’ closest commercial partners through the EA SPORTS FC franchise. The partnership is evolving beyond branding and into direct fan engagement, giving supporters worldwide a close-up look at two key stages of the club’s pre-season build-up.

• It builds on Juventus’ track record of testing new broadcast formats during pre-season. Last year the club worked with content creators to stream multiple camera angles and commentary of the same match.

Why It Matters

This isn’t FC Mobile’s first live broadcast, but it is the first time we’ve seen it within European club football.

EA previously streamed live MLS matches through an in-app “FCM TV” portal starting May 2025, in partnership with Apple TV. However, the fact that they have now replicated this with Juventus suggests it is a format EA intends to repeat.

There has likely been meaningful progress since that previous MLS initiative, too. EA had announced its acquisition of TRACAB back in February 2025, just months before the MLS broadcasts launched, meaning that integration was still early days when FCM TV first went live. At the time, EA stated its goal to turn the EA Sports App into the world’s leading interactive sports platform, with on-demand alternative broadcasts as one of the explicit features TRACAB’s infrastructure would further unlock. Over a year on, the Juventus stream is evidence of that plan showing up as a live product, with TRACAB’s infrastructure now far more embedded than it would have been for MLS.

It also tracks with where the industry is heading from a trends perspective. Analysts increasingly describe live sport and gaming as converging audiences rather than separate ones. The generation that grew up on sports games is now also the generation driving how live sport gets watched, and that crossover is one of the most commercially valuable in entertainment.

The wider market has shifted from chasing installs to squeezing more value from users already inside the app. Essentially we’re moving into a battle for attention and retention over acquisition.

Ultimately, EA doesn’t need the Juventus stream to bring in new FC Mobile users. What it needs to know is whether existing ones will stay in the app 45/90 minutes longer than usual, which is a monetisation question dressed up as a broadcast. More than anything else, this partnership was a study of fan behaviour. The results, and a wider roll out, are something to look out for.

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HIGHLIGHTS

Revolut becomes Como 1907’s Official Front-of-Shirt Partner 👕

• Revolut, the global fintech company with more than 75 million customers worldwide, has expanded its partnership with Como 1907, becoming the club’s Official Front-of-Shirt Partner from the 2026/27 season onward.

• The expanded deal will focus on deep product integration, embedding Revolut’s financial technology into the club’s operations and fan journey across ticketing, retail and matchday experiences.

WSL’s secondary competition rebrands as The Subway Players Cup with a new Swiss-style format 🏆

• Subway has agreed a new multi-year deal to become title partner of WSL Football’s secondary competition from 2026/27, renaming it from The Subway Women’s League Cup to The Subway Players Cup to reflect a format built around player welfare principles.

• The group stage will adopt a Swiss-style league format with fixtures drawn by region, guaranteeing a minimum of six matches to increase playing opportunities for players not involved in European competition, while the three UEFA Champions League qualified teams will not participate due to increased playing load.

YouTube becomes the new home for US live sport, via NBCUniversal and Disney deals on the same week 📺

• NBCUniversal and YouTube announced a global partnership on 27 July that will bundle Peacock Premium into YouTube Premium in the US from early 2027, covering NFL, NBA, MLB, Premier League, WNBA, SNL and Love Island USA.

• The same week, YouTube TV users gained the ability to link accounts for ESPN Unlimited access inside the ESPN App, a knock-on effect of last year’s Disney/YouTube TV carriage deal.

Premier League launches its biggest-ever US fan activation, fronted by Ed Sheeran ⚽

• The Premier League’s “Coast to Coast” is its first-ever nationwide US activation, spanning all 20 clubs and 15 cities, with an opening weekend of 21–24 August, fronted by Ed Sheeran (a minority shareholder and Ipswich Town supporter).

• It runs alongside “Find Your Match,” an 11-question quiz that assigns fans a club based on personality and adds them to a contactable Premier League database for follow-up on club news, signings and fixtures.

PGA Tour pilots an announcer-free broadcast built around natural course audio 🎙️

• PGA TOUR Studios is piloting “Marquee Group: Quiet Please,” an announcer-free stream debuting at the Rocket Classic on PGA TOUR LIVE via ESPN+, using natural course audio, player-caddie conversations and crowd reactions across all four rounds.

• Storytelling instead comes from enhanced graphics, real-time stats, Virtual Eye overlays and an interactive layer (QR codes, live polls, Tagboard social integration), with the format emerging from the Tour’s Fan Forward Initiative and two-thirds Fan Council backing.

THE ATTENTION SHIFT

NBC just handed YouTube the keys to American live sport. Google’s $11 billion quarter proves YouTube can win a World Cup without owning a single right. And the PGA Tour just took the commentators out of its broadcast entirely. Ed and Andy unpack what’s actually happening to the definition of a sports broadcaster this week.

They cover the NBCUniversal and YouTube global partnership, the ESPN and YouTube TV integration, Alphabet’s Q2 earnings pinning $11 billion to the World Cup, the Premier League’s Coast to Coast US activation fronted by Ed Sheeran, Juventus becoming the first European club to broadcast a match inside a video game via EA Sports FC Mobile, and the PGA Tour’s announcer-free stream trialled at the Rocket Classic.