Imagine if several major teams from any large-scale sport in America — take your pick — conspired together to make sure they didn’t face one another in order to get more wins. That’s effectively what has happened in the esports world of FIFA 20, which was exposed by a popular FIFA streamer and content creator and involves a number of top pro players involved in the game’s esports scene.
The Weekend League of FIFA 20 is the primary competitive mode for players of the game, granting participants a number of rewards that normally would cost large amounts of cash as well as a road to the FIFA eWorld Cup for pro players. During the third week of this particular mode’s competition, Nick “RunTheFUTMarket” Bartels would be disconnected from a game that would have normally seen him hit the Top 100 ranking. This immediately raised suspicion for Bartels, who hadn’t been disconnected during a match in three years in spite of FIFA having notable connection issues.
Later that same day, Bartels would reveal some screenshots on Twitter and YouTube from a Discord server where several players, including NA pros like Chicago Fire player Hektic_Jukez and NYC FC player Christopher “NYC_Chris” Holly, colluded among themselves to fix matches in order to avoid one another as well as stream snipe players like Bartels.
Why go through all of this trouble? Money, apparently. According to Bartels, content creators like himself and YouTuber Mike LaBelle finishing in the Top 100 would end up making more money from ad revenue and subscriber count. For comparison’s sake, the FIFA 20 tournament prize pool is collectively less that $4 million, despite the game reportedly making EA hundreds of millions and 2018’s version making nearly $3 billion.
It took until Friday, November 1st, for EA to take action. A disciplinary announcement confirmed that Holly would receive a two qualifier suspension from the Global Series for his role in the match fixing shenanigans, a role that Holly acknowledged and apologized for on Twitter.
The disciplinary announcement also issued a permanent ban against Kurt “Kurt0411” French for several harassing videos against EA employees as well as previous infractions during other live events that saw him receive final warnings at the time. This ban appears to be completely separate from the “dodging Discord” and has apparently kicked off a harassment campaign that saw several FIFA community manager Twitter accounts hacked and made to post messages of support for French. French appears to be urging his followers to brigade, according to quoted statements from a video:
“There’s a revolution on the way. You have to pick a side. And choose a side wisely. You can’t come after me and do nothing about your game. Enough is enough. Karma. It’s about damn time you start caring about us. We deserve justice. We deserve a damn football game.
“You have to wonder: what is going to happen next?”
