'A platform of music discovery...not just a game' - Inside EA FC 27's soundtrack and how a place on the playlist can change an artist's life

“First of all, I'm Brazilian. It's in my blood…It's family. Oh my God, I sound like Vin Diesel. I'm so sorry.”

Nono can’t help but laugh. She is onto something, though. It may be cliché, but there is something familial about the sport of soccer. And, for her personally, there’s something familial about soccer video games, too.

The 28-year-old singer was born in Rio de Janeiro and, at birth, kids in Rio are put into a Brazil jersey. It didn't take long for her to get a Flamengo one, too. Soccer was passed down from grandfather to mother and, ultimately, to Nono, who always took pride in using her Flamengo fandom to take jabs at her father's Fluminense.

She was just an okay player herself, she admits.

“I would embarrass my nation”, she tells GOAL, “but I’m Brazilian so I have to be better than most!” 

So much of her soccer fandom didn’t develop on the field, though; it came on the couch. 

Nono has fond memories of playing FIFA 98 on the Nintendo 64 with her cousins. She remembers wondering what it would be like to see those stars in real life. So, after moving to London, she went to see Arsenal at the Emirates to see Arsene Wenger's last match. From there, the immersion and passion were more real.

For her, so much started with a controller in her hand, though, and that makes the fact that she’s been on an EAFC soundtrack not once but twice feel more surreal. Her song "Vem" was on the soundtrack for FC 25. This time around, it's "Joga Bonito", a song quite obviously inspired by her Brazilian roots.

“I think the main thing is that it's so easy for us to be dismissive of games,” she says, “because it's like, ‘Oh, it's just a game,’ but it is a way of connecting with the culture, with everyone. It really is about family.”

Fellow Brazilian Kyan sees it that way, too. In fact, his entire music career has been inspired by his family’s love of EA’s series of games. His latest release featured five songs inspired by the World Cup. The artwork for that release? A depiction of him on the cover of the old FIFA Street series.

He grew up playing with his older brothers, although he joked that they weren't always so eager to let their younger brother play. It was FIFA Street that unlocked something in him. Now, he has a song, "Garage", in the game.

“I don't really have that many goals with music,” Kyan tells GOAL, “but I started to have more after this.”

For Kyan, landing a spot on the soundtrack is a reward rooted in childhood memories he still treasures. Becoming part of that world is an achievement he once couldn't have imagined, and he jokes that hearing his own music in the game might even help him play better.

That childhood love has followed him into adulthood, with his family watching him go from playing alongside his brothers to becoming part of the soundtrack himself.

“I still play it today," he says. "I spend money on it, I have my account, I want the players. So they saw and followed this whole process and saw me put the music into the game. It’s a huge achievement, a storytelling moment of, ‘Man, sometimes you feel like you're wasting time with this,’ but everything this game added to me as an artist made me get into this game.”

But how does an artist actually get into the game? Meet the man in charge of assembling EA’s soundtracks: Steve Schnur. 

The process of curating a soundtrack is a long one. In fact, the process for FC 28 has already begun. 

“When did FC 27 come out?" Schnur asks. "We start the day after for next year. We work on it for 364 days. That's a lie. We take maybe two days in there, but the truth is we've already started our kickoff meetings for 28."

Curating the FC 27 soundtrack felt particularly personal for Schnur, EA’s worldwide president of music and marketing. Over 25 years at the company, he has helped shape soundtracks across FIFA, EA FC, Madden and other Electronic Arts games. As he assembled this year’s playlist, those past classics kept bringing him back to one question: could the new soundtrack live up to them?

“It comes with a responsibility, which I don't take lightly,” he says. 

Schnur wants each year’s soundtrack to feel fresh and make a bigger impact than the last. Over the past year or two, he’s noticed players around the world sharing their favorite songs from FIFA 09, FIFA 14 and FC 26 on social media, a reminder of how much those soundtracks mean to them.

“I've made a significant concerted effort over the last one to two years to bring FC back to the glory days of FIFA music," he says. "In other words, I want people raving about the music from FC 27, like they rave about FIFA 09 or FIFA 14. Those are always the bar. That's where the arguments start. I wanted to start those up again.”

To start up those discussions, Schnur continued to go global. Some of the game’s most memorable songs were in languages few would have expected. If EAFC is to be the videogame ambassador of soccer, it needs to speak all of the languages of soccer, and Schnur feels that responsibility.

It’s why he goes to Brazil to get artists like Nono and Kyan. It’s why Japanese-American rapper Miyachi gets to represent Tokyo and New York. It’s why the total playlist ends up at 120 songs from 36 countries, offering little tastes of the game all over the world. The hope is that you may hear a style of music that you’ve never heard before.

That’s what happened to Kyan, and that’s how he began his own music journey. Growing up in Brazil, the music on offer was somewhat limited. Video games, like EAFC, opened his eyes to genres elsewhere.

“We only listened to something very niche, which was funk, and lived that whole culture,” he says. “I got access to other types of music and understood what people were doing and rhyming, much like many hip-hop songs that were on the FC playlist. This opened me up to understand other types of music in a cultural way, outside of a bubble, where I could talk to people about the game and also about these artists, because they are part of this universe. 

“So it was like a new catalog for someone who would be totally imprisoned living only that. This playlist? It's a catalog of knowledge, and it’s exchanging knowledge between various cultures.”

Schnur sees it that way, too. As someone who has been in the music business for decades, he’s willing to let everyone in on a little secret: the words don’t matter. The language doesn’t matter, either. What matters, he says, is feeling.

“Music is not meant to be heard; it's meant to be felt,” he says, “and the language is not a barrier. When I was a kid, there were songs in German. I could age myself here and talk about like Nena and '99 Luftballons' and sh*t like that. Who said that music can't trigger an emotional response in us all, especially when it's connected to something that you love?

“I think it's all about the feel, and in this case, it's all about aligning itself with the thing that you love the most. I don’t know, look at Phil Collins’ 'In the Air Tonight' in [the movie] The Hangover. Now, we'll forever laugh when we hear the drum break. That is the idea on steroids.”

The hope, then, is that fans will associate moments of joy with the soundtrack that accompanied it. And, for artists, the hope is that those moments of joy lead to new listeners that wouldn’t have otherwise found them.

Japanese-American rapper Miyachi acknowledges that he isn’t the biggest soccer fan. He does understand what having his song in EAFC means and, more broadly, what the sport means to people. You get that understanding when you’re raised in New York, after all. 

It was during his youth in New York that he fell in love with hip-hop. That journey has now led him to Tokyo, where he makes his favorite music in Japanese, opening doors that he never imagined were possible.

“I grew up in an era where the Yankees were in their golden era,” he tells GOAL, “so I kind of went towards baseball. You grow up and become an adult, and you realize that soccer is like way bigger than that sh*t. You grow up thinking the Yankees are the biggest thing in the world, but soccer is a different level.”

“The fact that I'm making it in Japan is crazy,” he adds. “It just caught fire at the right time and in the right place. Now I'm living in Tokyo, making Japanese hip-hop mixed with my New York roots. I'm blending my cultures together and trying to take this sh*t to the world."

FC 27 is, of course, a wild way to do just that. It's a game played all over the world, and one that will introduce him to entirely different audiences. His song "Way Up" is in Japanese, which means gamers outside of New York and Tokyo will hear something unlike anything they’ve heard before.

“We represented for Japan,” he says, “and I feel blessed to be able to do that for FC27. A lot of people don't know about Japanese hip-hop, so maybe this will be their entryway. It's a banger too. I definitely feel like people are gonna be like, ‘Yo, what's that?’”

Schnur has seen that happen time and time again, and he’s quick to rattle off his success stories: Circle Jerk, Kasabian, Kings of Leon, Cage the Elephant - all names familiar to fans of the game. Artists like Avicii and Billie Eilish were in the game before they were megastars. “Jerk It Out” by Caesar’s Palace was so good it was in two games. 

There are multiple parts of this process that Schnur finds fun. Among the most? Watching as an artist that few knew become one of those success stories. He’s already seen it happen this year.

Among the newcomers on this year’s soundtrack is a band called Bruvvy, whose song “Little Shiva” is among the early breakouts. It was the No. 1 song on Spotify’s “EA SPORTS FC 27 Soundtrack” playlist. Comment sections describe it as a throwback to old-school EA. 

For a band like Bruvvy, one with under 25,000 followers on Instagram, this is the big break, one that introduces their music to a global audience.

“That's life-changing for artists,” Schnur says, “and I think the thing that's worth noting beyond that it doesn't stop in a month. People reflect back. I told Bruvvy that in three years, when they're out on whatever tour they're going to be out on, and they play the song from FC 27, every person in the audience is going to every word.”

The hope is that it happens for Miyachi, Kyan and Nono, too. It could happen to any one of the dozens of rising artists on the soundtrack. For artists, it’s one of many ways to introduce your music to new audiences. For the team behind those audiences, it’s one of the quickest ways to mainstream appeal in an ever-changing musical landscape.

“Twenty to 30 years ago," Schnur says, "before we started this crazy idea, the goal that artists used to set was ‘How do I get on that radio station I was brought up on?’ or ‘How do I get on MTV?’ 

“Guess what? FC is a platform of music discovery. Period. End of story. It's not just a game. As a matter of fact, it's interesting because I don't even want to refer to the implementation of music in FC anymore as music in a game; I want to refer to it as a platform of music discovery.”

It’s been just a few weeks since his presence on the soundtrack was confirmed, but Miyachi is already feeling the weight. It’s not just the increase in notoriety, but the reception from friends and family, too. Even before everything else, this is an achievement. This is an indication that you’ve made it.

“It's just been significant for my team,” he says. “My manager, people in my team have a soccer background. We’re, collectively, big fans of the game and we’ve been remembering and reminiscing on memories about it from when we were kids. This is definitely it for our generation.

“I think this one has to be at the top of the list in terms of the reach and how many people have heard. I've been getting responses from everyone about the fact that my song is in the game. It's a blessing.”

Nono sees it as a blessing, too, for multiple reasons. On one hand, she gets to represent her people, Brazilians, in her own way. There is no shortage of Brazilians pushing soccer’s culture forward and she, against all odds, is now one of them. Her song is already on the console version of FC 27 and is currently part of a vote to be included in the mobile version, which would connect here with a whole different group of players.

She’s also representing little girls, too. The gaming space has often been seen as male-dominated, but Nono says it doesn’t have to be that way. 

“You have this opportunity where you're allowing people that can have a phone and actually have access to the game,” she says, “and not just have this incredible piece of entertainment,  but also a piece of culture because football is culture. You get new music, and you can inspire the next girls that want to be singers or players.

“It is an honor to be able to see this new wave of girls and women hold their own, have this game, be on covers of things and be on soundtracks of something that was once so male-dominated. Now, we're part of the culture. We're part of this because football is inclusive.”

The artists will now spend the next few weeks reveling in it. Those who play the game will smile every time they hear their music on the menus. Meanwhile, as Schnur says, this isn’t something that lasts a game cycle; it lasts a lifetime. Going forward, these artists will always be able to see they were a part of this.

That was all Kyan ever wanted. He grew up wanting exactly this. Now, it’s real, and his life will never be the same as a result.

“This is one more validation and proof that we are on the right path,” he says, “that we are doing something right and concrete with our art. This is our universe, everything we love, and EAFC is included in this; that's why it has this importance in my life.”

So, when you’re firing up the game, just remember that every song comes with that little bit of extra importance. And, 15 years from now, when you hear that song again somewhere unexpected, allow it to take you back to the good and bad times that came from playing the game.