[namdnay]

And the following year FIFA will give the licence to another developer, any everyone will switch to that. PES was a far better game than FIFA, but everyone wanted to play with their favourite players and teams. There's no way EA will kill that cash cow

[MarkCole]

The article mentions that the FIFA license only includes rights to the name, logo and rights to the World Cup.

The player and teams name, likenesses and logos are governed by licenses with other organisations.

[miki123211]

Alternatively, they will allow players to load external databases of teams, logos and footballers from a file, and the community will do the rest of the job. This kind of stuff has been tried before and it's usually pretty safe, legally speaking.

[eldaisfish]

the problem with that approach is abundantly clear in the sales figure gap between PES and FIFA.

Most people are lazy and don't want to bother with locating files, patching games, dealing with borked patches and so on.