Amazon has reportedly made a bid to buy Electronic Arts (EA), the US video game company behind the hugely successful FIFA series. According to Stockholm-based gaming content agency GLHF, Amazon will confirm its bid to take over the gaming firm on Friday. Rumours have circulated since the spring that EA had been looking to be acquired by a large company, including Disney, Apple or Amazon. The rumoured takeover was first reported by USA Today, which said'Amazon has finally made an offer', citing GLHF as its source. Such a purchase could broaden Amazon's push into sports, following its purchase of live streaming rights of NFL and the Premier League on its Prime platform.

If the University of Hairy Nipples' Fighting Areolas want to play on blue turf, then by cracky, go to town: It had all come a long, long, long way from 1993, when EA launched a college football series minus the rights to school names and logos (Michigan vs. BYU could be simulated as'Ann Arbor' vs. 'Provo') to mirror its successful Madden franchise, even slapping the name of another iconic Bay Area coach, Bill Walsh -- then about to wrap up his second tenure at Stanford University -- on the title. Within a few years, the series had dropped the Walsh name but added collegiate licensing, exploding in the summer of 1995 with 108 schools, conference logos and real bowl names (Fiesta, Orange, Rose and Sugar). It's dead -- technically on a hiatus -- now, a run of more than 20 summers slammed shut in 2013 not by consumer disinterest but legal entanglement. Because even if EA couldn't use players' names, as it violated the NCAA's rules regarding amateurism, programmers were inclined to approximate with every school the real-life attributes, from both a skill and physique standpoint, of its star players in any given season: You knew who they were. They knew who they were. If even if you didn't, the game eventually featured a customizer with sliders that accounted for the most precise of details and free downloadable fan-generated rosters that did all of the naming work for you. A lot of folks got rich off NCAA Football, of course, save for the players whom the game wasn't really (wink) trying (wink) to (wink) emulate (wink). Enter Ed O'Bannon and his legal team, and ne'er the twain; rather than wrestle with how to compensate its student-athletes going forward, the SEC, Big Ten and Pac-12 conferences, three of the so-called Power 5 leagues, forbade the use of their trademarks after the summer of 2013, and EA pulled the plug. And that's the Catch-22: Even thought we know it was wrong, we still miss it.