The full FIFA cover stars history, spanning every regional variant from the series’ 1993 debut through to its final edition in 2022, is one of the most vivid records of how football and gaming grew up together. With the FIFA World Cup 2026 having kicked off on 11 June, it feels like the right moment to revisit the franchise that put the beautiful game on millions of television screens via a console controller, and to remember the faces EA chose to put on the box each year.
From Platt and Lalas to the End of an Era: FIFA Cover Stars History
The series launched in 1993 with FIFA International Soccer, and even at that early stage EA was already producing region-specific cover art. The UK and international release featured David Platt and Piotr Świerczewski. North America got Alexi Lalas. Another North American and Japanese variant featured Ruud Gullit alongside Pat Bonner and Paul McGrath, while the German version carried Lothar Matthäus. The Japanese Super Famicom edition, in a design choice that now reads as fascinatingly anonymous, showed nothing more than a pair of hands.
That tradition of regional differentiation ran all the way through the franchise’s life. Some entries carried only one global cover star; others gave individual countries or territories their own unique artwork entirely. The result, across nearly three decades, is a catalogue of footballing faces that reads like a timeline of the sport itself.
By 2021, the FIFA series had shifted 325 million copies, making it effortlessly the most popular sports series in video game history and one of the best-selling franchises in interactive entertainment outright. Those numbers reflected a formula that worked year after year: updated squads, a shiny new cover star, and the addictive pull of Ultimate Team.
Why the FIFA Name Disappeared from the Box
Then came the split. EA and FIFA ended their near three-decade partnership, and the reasons, as Reuters reported, came down to money. Media reports indicated that FIFA had demanded EA double its yearly payments to the governing body, which had been running at $150 million annually. EA declined to meet those terms, and the two parties went their separate ways.
The result is that the game series is now known as EA Sports FC, with EA Sports FC 24 serving as the inaugural entry under the new branding. The FIFA name, which had appeared on football game boxes since 1993, is gone. It is a strange thing to process if you grew up buying a new FIFA each Christmas: the same engine, the same modes, the same cover-star reveal cycle, but a fundamentally different name above the badge.
The cover star list that follows below is, accordingly, a closed archive rather than an ongoing record. Every footballer who appeared on a FIFA box, from that first 1993 release right through to FIFA 23, is documented here with regional variants included wherever they existed. Some covers are immediately recognisable; others, particularly the earlier regional editions, have become genuinely obscure. If you spot any errors or missing entries, please leave a comment below.
One thing the full list makes plain is how the cover choices shifted over time. Early editions leaned on recognisable names from European leagues, reflecting the markets EA was targeting first. As the series expanded globally, the regional artwork multiplied, and individual countries began seeing their domestic heroes given a moment on the sleeve. That attention to local markets was part of what drove those 325 million sales, and it is preserved in full in the catalogue below.
Click on any image to enlarge it. The era of FIFA on the box is closed, but the archive is very much worth exploring.
