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EA's FIFA Research Community Report
By: Andrew Castenmiller
Date: Friday, 01 October, 2004
EA Assistant Producer Matt Holme talks about how the community can become involved in the FIFA series. Below is Matt's report.
"In my first days as an Assistant Producer here at EA Canada, I was assigned to the Common Football Database team. Together with three other Producers, I would be responsible for assuring that the teams and players who feature in this year’s FIFA and Total Club Manager games, look, play and perform like their real-life selves.
For the past two to three years, EA SPORTS have steadily been building up a team of community based researchers from all four corners of the globe.
Last year, as many of you will know, FIFA Football 2004 was the first FIFA to feature complete lower divisions from the five major football leagues of Europe. On top of this, Total Club Manager 2004 featured an even larger array of leagues and divisions meaning that our Team and Player Database grew tremendously. Both game’s databases came in for some criticism with certain players and teams appearing inaccurate.
This year we knew that, to ensure FIFA and TCM were truly the most up-to-date and complete football games ever created, we had to expand our team of researchers greatly.
First step was to completely redesign how our team and player data was collected. We built a brand new web based editor for our researchers to import the data into.
We then went on the look out for football minded individuals. The job description was simple; we needed dedicated people who would be interested in sharing their unique football knowledge by adding the information of their favourite clubs and players into our database.
News posts went out on the big FIFA and TCM community websites and forums. An application page was created and before we knew it, over 1000 potential candidates had applied.
From the masses of applications, the candidates who we felt boasted the best qualifications for the assignment were asked to come on board as “Managing Editors”. Each Managing Editor would be assigned a League/Division to look after. Their role would be to put together a team of “Club Editors” (also contacted from the application forms) who would be assigned a group of teams to research.
To date, over 100 Managing Editors have joined us, with a further 200 Club Editors contributing to a database which now boasts over 27,000 players from over 1800 teams.
We are not stopping there. With more players and teams being added all the time, we are always on the outlook for further talent. If being a Managing or Club Editor sounds like the type of pastime which would interest you, make sure you check out our online application form.
As a former webmaster of a FIFA community website, it is a real thrill to be constantly introducing talent from the community into our football games here at EA SPORTS. We realize the importance of the FIFA community and the websites that support them, and are constantly looking to increase the opportunities community members have to contribute to our football games."
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