The very well documented war between EA Sports and Maltese professional FIFA player Kurt “Kurt0411” Fenech reached a new chapter. In its latest attempt to deal with the troublesome player, FIFA's publisher shut down Fenech’s EA account which naturally resulted in a public outburst by the player.
EA and Kurt0411 – No love lost
Electronic Arts have been actively pursuing Kurt0411 in the past half a year or so. The Maltese player had always been outspoken and quite frankly highly critical of the bigtime publisher and while he was mostly getting away with it for a long time, shit hit the fan last fall.
On November 1, 2019, after a series of warnings and a short ban imposed the previous year, Fenech was banned from all FIFA Global Series events. EA cited “Code of Conduct violations” as the official reason, those violations being continuous harassment of EA employees, broadcasters at events and fellow FIFA players.
Whether you’d classify Kurt’s stingy tongue as harassment is all up to you. Clearly, the player was not all too happy about the decision and to say his relations with EA did not warm up in the following months would be an understatement.
The player claims that the company even tried to shut down his Twitch and YouTube channels, which is, you know, harassment. What they did do for sure though, is banning him from all EA services, active as of today. This time the reasons brought up in the official note accompanying the ban went further down the pronoun path, with Kurt0411’s actions being described as abusive and threatening.
Kurt, of course, let it all out on Twitter as soon as news broke out and as is often the case, the FIFA community had his back, for what that’s worth.
Incredibly stuff honestly...banning me from their esports events wasn't enough, trying to get my Twitch and YouTube channels banned wasn't enough, they now shut down my 10 year plus Fut Founder account. No words pic.twitter.com/EqAVWprTI5
— Kurt (@Kurt0411Fifa) February 24, 2020
Now, you may or may not agree with the player’s stance on EA and his choice of expressing his thoughts. But banning people over some tweets and videos? Really? It’s one thing to shut him off the pro circuit if he has indeed shown abusive behavior towards anyone on LAN. It’s an entirely different story to ban him altogether for crapping on your company. Hell, most people do, it’s EA. Ban everybody then?
At the end of the day, it’s EA’s world, they can ban you over whatever they wish and no matter how much we wave the flag of ridiculousness, the company will remain blind to it, as it always does.
