December 15 – EA Sports’ senior director of football esports Sam Turkbas believes the UEFA eEuro has reached an important point of maturity, after the 2025 edition was staged at London’s Twickenham Stadium on Saturday night.
The event, which brought together eight of Europe’s top EA Sports FC 26 players competing for a $100,000 prize pool, marked the second running of the eEuros – and, crucially, the first to exist entirely outside the shadow of the men’s UEFA European Championship.
“This is our second time running the eEuros, and this time it’s not coinciding with the real-life Euros during the summer,” Turkbas told Insideworldfootball in an exclusive interview at Twickenham on Saturday. “So [we’ve] transitioned from using the Euros as a moment to jump off to making the eEuros into something more consistent, which is really good for all the different national partners that UEFA has.
“It’s really exciting to be here now. It’s the winter and it’s in London and there’s no Euros in sight on the men’s side, but we’re still holding the event.”
That sense of repeatability, Turkbas said, is central to EA’s long-term vision for national-team-based esports competitions.
“I think creating this repeatability for the ecosystem, working with UEFA to make sure that their members have an opportunity to be engaged on a regular basis in esports, is really exciting.”
From EA’s perspective, the eEuros occupy a distinct space within its wider FC Pro ecosystem, blending publisher, federation and player pathways in a way few other competitions do.
“It’s an opportunity to engage our players in a new and unique way,” Turkbas said. “When you look at it from the UEFA perspective and from the wider Euro standpoint, we’re engaging with a lot of their national team partners too.
“There’s over 50 countries that are eligible to compete in this — and giving all those different countries a pathway to find a player, whether they’ve been engaged in esports and engaged in FC before or not.”
Balancing EA’s global esports strategy with region-specific competitions remains a key consideration, but Turkbas stressed that the eEuros work because of the strength of the UEFA partnership.
“The right opportunities have to present themselves,” he said. “The partnership with UEFA and being able to create the eEuros with them and build that property up into something that’s really unique for the players in Europe is awesome.”
The national-team format has also encouraged deeper involvement from football associations, some of whom are now actively managing their esports programmes.
“We have a lot of engagement from some of the football associations,” Turkbas explained. “For example, England Gaming has been named the FA’s official esports club. The federations are actually helping to manage their esports teams and are making sure their players have the right level of support.”
That institutional buy-in reflects a broader shift in how traditional football stakeholders view esports.
“For a specific period of time [esports] was viewed mainly as a commercial opportunity,” Turkbas said. “But if you also look at it as an opportunity to engage with new fans or to more deeply engage your current fans, that’s a really important perspective to have.”
On the competitive side, the 2025 final delivered a familiar outcome. Denmark’s Anders Vejrgang successfully defended his title, defeating Netherlands’ Emre Yilmaz 12–9 to claim back-to-back UEFA eEuro championships and the $30,000 winner’s prize. The Team Falcons player had earlier lost to Yilmaz in the eChampions League final, making the result a measure of redemption.
Looking ahead, Turkbas hopes the eEuros can evolve into a travelling event with a stronger live audience component.
“I personally would love to see more fans engaging in person, cheering the team on,” he said. “I would also love to see in the future more of a hosted scenario where a country is actually putting their hand up and saying, ‘Hey, we want to have this competition in our country’.”
For now, Twickenham marked another step in EA and UEFA’s effort to establish the eEuros as a permanent fixture on the esports calendar – one rooted in national identity, federation engagement and a steadily widening pathway for players across Europe.
Contact the writer of this story, Harry Ewing, at [email protected]