Dr. Estée Fresco
Associate Professor of Communication & Media Studies, York University (Canada). In 2025/2026, she was a Visiting Scholar hosted by the Center for Sports Communication and Media, Communication Studies, University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of the award-winning book, Red Mitten Nationalism: Sport, Communication and Settler Colonialism in Canada.
Email: efresco@yorku.ca
Dr. Natalie Coulter
Associate Professor in Communication and Media Studies at York University. She is currently leading a SSHRC funded grant on Roblox, and is author of Kids, KidTech and Digital Capitalism: The Fight for our Digital Futures (2026), and co-author of Media and Communication in Canada.
Email: ncoulter@yorku.ca
FIFA has become active on the digital gaming platform Roblox over the past few years. The organization took over a soccer game on the platform called Super League Soccer during the 2025 Club World Cup, where professional soccer teams compete against one another. User engagement was high: over a two-month period, the game drew 20 million gameplay sessions and 61% of surveyed players reported that the game made them plan to watch the Club World Cup. By the following year, when national teams began competing in the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the game had been rebranded FIFA Super Soccer, accumulated over 1.1 billion visits, and averaged 1.5 million gameplay sessions a day.
FIFA’s presence on Roblox is part of its broader expansion into gaming and its attempt to grow a youth following, particularly among Gen Z and Alpha audiences who, as one industry insider put it, “aren’t just watching but actively engaging in sports.” FIFA Super Soccer exposes users to recognizable features of the World Cup: they compete for official national teams and sponsor logos appear on jerseys and arena sideboards. We argue that Roblox influences the game in meaningful ways, and that FIFA has adapted to accommodate its unique commercialized logics.
In making this argument, we treat FIFA’s involvement with Roblox as a case study of the mediatization of soccer in the digital realm. Mediatization posits that sport and media are not simply interrelated. Rather, sport becomes embedded in media and communication practices to such a degree that those practices transform the act of playing and consuming sport. Applied to FIFA Super Soccer, this concept illustrates that global soccer is not simply being extended into digital games. Instead, the way youth audiences engage with World Cup soccer is being reshaped by platforms like Roblox.
Scholar Natalie Coulter argues that Roblox is not easily defined. It functions simultaneously as a game, social media, space for content creation and consumption, marketplace, metaverse, and platform. This conceptualization of Roblox is essential to understanding how it is shaping FIFA’s efforts to gamify soccer for youth audiences. Specifically, it incorporates user engagement and peer-to-peer exchange through an interface that promotes and sells branded products and commodifies user labor.
This dynamic of capitalizing on user-generated content was evident in the development of FIFA Super Soccer as a game, even before FIFA became involved. A student at King’s College London originally built a basic soccer game on Roblox, which the gaming studio Gamefam later acquired and turned into Super Soccer League (Bernstein, 2025, Dec. 22). After FIFA ended its long-term partnership with Electronic Arts in 2022, it began working with Gamefam and eventually re-branded the game.
The reliance on user-generated content extends beyond the Roblox platform itself, into recorded FIFA Super Soccer gameplay posted on YouTube. Here, the act of playing the game becomes a product consumed on a second digital platform, generating user-created content across multiple sites. Players not only engage with the game using Roblox’s interface but also post edited videos of their gameplay on YouTube, splicing in memes and other entertaining material. Throughout, their narration conforms to some existing broadcast standards and deviates from others. It is part live-sport color commentator and part self-narration typical of content-creator videos.
One such video opens with a voiceover in which the player describes his attempt to climb the game’s “pro server” ranking system. In doing so, he demonstrates the kind of sustained engagement Roblox rewards. He has accumulated enough points to access a pro server, which offers a superior experience. For instance, he gains access to a 7-on7 match rather than a 4-on-4 one that may include AI-controlled players, a badge marketing his achievement, and the chance to play alongside, and against, others who have invested comparable time and skill.
This example demonstrates the distinct logic of Roblox at work. It produces an immersive digital environment in which users are simultaneously creators, consumers, and commentators. Within this context, World Cup soccer becomes a digitized product both created and consumed by youth audiences. This practice, in turn, influences the relationship between Roblox players and the FIFA World Cup. For some, enjoyment of live broadcasts of the tournament may be enhanced by digital gameplay. Others may be motivated to watch the tournament for the first time. Still others may limit their engagement to the digital realm. In every case, the World Cup is mediated through digital engagement with a gamified version of the sport.
By using the Roblox game FIFA Super Soccer as a case study to examine the mediatization of soccer in the digital realm, we have shown that sport is no longer simply a platform for advertising and branding. Rather, sport accommodates new ways of commercializing sport in the digital realm through user-generated content and engagement.
