There are two things that I have to eternally thank my love for football simulators: locating places on the map and being familiar with a good part of the new talents that emerge in the quarries. I got off this annual roulette a long time ago, when the textures of the grass or the expressions of the players were not so important, but their faces were already well understood and you could recognize them thanks to the transfer of image rights, a tricky and lucrative topic even at that time.
And for example, a button: Oliver Kahn’s. The name of the legendary goalkeeper of Bayern Munich and the German national team in the 90s and early 2000s disappeared from football games to return almost a quarter of a century later, converted into an icon to close one of the longest and most curious legal disputes.
Oliver Kahn’s lawsuit. Coincidentally, while searching for images of the special FIFA game for the 2002 World Cup, I found this one in the newspaper archive that illustrates the cover of this article and which is great for us. Because it was just then that the German goalkeeper filed a lawsuit against EA for image appropriation, as stated in the As article of the time: he considered that they were marketing his identity without having given his permission or receiving compensation for it. The video game company faced a fine of up to 250,000 euros or up to six months in prison.
Why is it important. This trial changed the rules of the game because it showed that video game companies cannot use the image of a famous athlete without their direct permission. In fact, it marked a before and after: from then on companies had to be much more careful with contracts, thus preventing big brands from taking advantage of the fame of footballers for their faces. After all, Kahn was a pioneer, but he could have been the tip of the iceberg of a flood of similar lawsuits, as the law firm Pinsent Masons explains.
Context. It was the 2000s when football games began to look very real and in that image quality significantly improved compared to that original FIFA 94, having the real names and faces of the stars was a powerful and attractive selling point. EA had signed deals with FIFPro to be able to use player identities en masse, so 800 players from 40 countries were virtually represented in the hit FIFA series. The problem? That the union did not have the rights of everyone. It was one of the first train wrecks between the ambitions of a huge American technology company versus European privacy laws.
Kahn 1 – EA 0, This is how Der Spiegel titled the goalkeeper’s victory in the German courts in 2003, ruling that the agreement that EA had with the FIFPro union did not cover the use of Kahn’s image, since the goalkeeper was not part of that organization. But it was more a moral victory than a practical one: Kahn managed to stop the distribution of the 2002 FIFA World Cup, but by the time he won EA had already launched FIFA 2003. In fact, the goalkeeper tried to get ads featuring a blonde goalkeeper to disappear, but the judge rejected the request: “Not all blonde goalkeepers are Oliver Kahn.”
EA removed Kahn from the national team but kept him as Bayern’s goalkeeper under a separate agreement with the German league. The most striking thing is what happened next: to avoid any problems, the character based on Kahn was simply called “Jens Mustermann”, the equivalent of a completely generic and anonymous name like John Doe. Paradoxically, that name bears a lot of resemblance to that of Jens Lehmann, the goalkeeper who sent Kahn to the Mannschaft bench in the 2006 World Cup.
Yes, but. Kahn won, but did not convince: The director of EA Germany stated that FIFA 2003 would remain on the market and that the new contracts were “even more solid” than before. EA did not change its business model: it continued to use block licenses and continued to operate normally. Kahn was absent from EA video games for years and it was not for legal reasons, but because he did not want to negotiate with them again. It has been now, with the nostalgia and evolution of modern game modes based on micropayments, that it has returned in the form of an ICON card in EA Sports FC 26, actively participating in promotions and profiting from it.
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