EA Sports makes its biggest names disappear from Times Square

EA SPORTS FC marked the global launch of FC 27 with a Times Square takeover that made its celebrity cast disappear from their usual billboards, only to reveal where they had gone: playing the game together.

Created by Uncommon, ‘Everyone’s Missing’ brought Jude Bellingham, Kylian Mbappé, Lewis Hamilton, Ted Lasso, Alyssa Thompson and Lewis Capaldi into one image, photographed by Gabriel Moses.

Characters from The Sims, Star Wars and Disney also appear.

Rather than filling Times Square with individual endorsements, FC 27 empties those spaces and gathers everyone around the same screen.

It is part of the wider ‘Everyone’s Playing’ brand campaign, positioning football culture as something that now moves freely between sport, music, entertainment and gaming. It follows a similar crossover instinct seen in Nike’s ‘Rip the Script’, which also mixed footballers with figures from wider popular culture.

A hero launch film directed by Vedran Rupic extends the same idea, moving between football stars and the people and characters who have made FC part of their world.

Uncommon co-founder Nils Leonard said: “You can’t tell people football is for everyone and then only put footballers on the poster. So we didn’t.”

An EA SPORTS spokesperson added: “FC 27 is for the fans who’ve clocked thousands of hours with us over the years, just as much as it’s for the ones picking up a controller for the first time.”

The launch follows EA SPORTS’ Zlatan FC 26 cover, which recreated a childhood photograph of Ibrahimović for the previous game’s Ultimate Edition.

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