With the release of FIFA Football 2003 from EA talks about the largest marketing campaign behind this year's game. Players sometimes talk about mystical influences on the game, influences that are out of their hands: a referee who allows the game to go with them, or makes it go against them, a crowd that leads them to an unforgettable comeback or even the presence in the crowd of a player who has been injured for six months. When players talk about that influence, they do so in hushed tones. They whisper of the presence of the 12th man. FIFA Football 2003 invites you to be the 12th man.

Al King, Director of Consumer Marketing, Europe, Electronic Arts said: "The game is targeted at 16-34 year old gamers who own or play on the required hardware; the focus this year is on the hard core gamers as well as the more mainstream segments."

Star players Edgar Davids, Ryan Giggs and Roberto Carlos have made time in their busy schedules to form a "Football Council" leading the largest FIFA marketing campaign seen in Europe by staring in individual TV and print advertising investigating the 12th man phenomenon.

The campaign consists of TV, print, outdoor, an internet micro-site, perimeter boards in football stadiums, etc. and will run across Europe. Kick-off will be on the 25th of October with the print campaign and the micro site www.fifa2003.ea.com, which comes in 7 languages. 3 TV spots will start to air on the 31st of October. The 3 spots each have 30sec and 20sec versions.

UK Campaign Highlights include:

*Large scale UK TV Campaign

*Pre-awareness, launch and post-launch - specialist, national & lifestyle print advertising

*Nationwide billboard campaign

*Huge in store FIFA presence at retail

*Week long demo disc offer with The Sun

*ITV Sport FIFA microsite

*FIFA tournaments at Burton stores

*Hoardings at key UEFA Cup and England Euro qualifier games

FIFA Football 2003 is released on October 25th 2002 for the PlayStation2 computer entertainment system and for PC-CD, the PlayStation, the XboxTM video game system from Microsoft Corporation, NINTENDO GAMECUBE on November 1st 2002 and GameBoy Advance on 15th November 2002.

This is a huge marketing campaign! Hopefully they will do one like this also in the rest of Europe. Either way, EA is going to take over the UK!