EA Sports will provide crowd noise for Premier League matches in the absence of live crowds

While the English Premier League has been providing entertainment in the age of social distancing thanks to the ePremier League Invitational Tournament played in FIFA 20, now that actual matches are returning to the field FIFA is coming to the rescue again—with EA Sports providing crowd noises for Sky Sports in the absence of actual audience members in the seats.

While other sporting events have replaced crowds with cardboard cutouts (or in the case of one Korean baseball match, stuffed animals), the eerie silence can make games seem more like training exercises. Also, it's a lot harder to cover up all the swearing.

And that's why, as the Sky Sports website explains, "In partnership with EA SPORTS FIFA, Sky Sports has created a range of bespoke and team-specific crowd noises and chants to bring the vibrant atmosphere of the Premier League to the restart."

Presumably there will be an element of live control over the crowd noise to simulate responses to goals and penalties and whatnot. Currently the plan is for the Premier League to restart on June 17, after three months of shutdown, with Aston Villa vs Sheffield United and Manchester City vs Arsenal as the first two matches. It's all provisional at this stage, of course.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.