EA Sports College Football will pay players just $500 each, no royalties

Electronic Arts compensates college footballers for their appearance EA Sports College FootballCollege Football Players Association urges a boycott.

That’s according to two reports, one of them setting the cash pool for all college players at $5 million, or about $500 per player. They will not be paid royalties on the game’s sales, either.

The college sports website ON3 spoke to Justin Falcinelli, the CFBPA’s vice president, who called it “just a ridiculously low amount of money.” Likewise, the group’s executive director published a newsletter on Wednesday advising players not to take the deal.

Polygon reached out to EA Sports for a comment.

Falcinelli explained to ON3 how his organization contacted NFL players to find out that the recent royalties for Madden NFL were between $17,000-$28,000. This is because the NFL Players Association has a group licensing agreement with Madden NFL.

Sportico reported in May that EA and OneTeam Partners had partnered to create a group license deal. The pool was also set at $5 million, for approximately 10,000 Football Bowl Subdivision (the top tier of college football) players.

EA Sports had developed and published an NCAA Football video game for about 20 years until 2013, when developments in a lawsuit brought by a former basketball player made the publisher’s situation untenable.

Athletes have recently begun being paid for so-called NIL deals (name, image, and likeness), which in the past would have rendered them ineligible to continue playing, after a California law guaranteeing college athletes’ right to be paid for the use of their likeness ended up changing the NCAA’s rules nationwide. With the changes to the NCAA’s NIL and eligibility policies, EA announced in February 2021 the College Football series was returning.

EA, a licensing partner, and the NCAA eventually settled that 2013 case for $40 million, a sum that did cover multiple years where players appeared in the game and were not compensated — but a sum that’s still nearly three times, per player, what EA is offering players for 2024’s EA Sports College Football.