One of gaming’s most recognizable executives is moving on to sports.
Electronic Arts chief operating officer Peter Moore is leaving the gaming publisher to take on the role of chief executive officer at the Liverpool Football Club in England. That organization made the announcement today on its official website. Moore will oversee the business operations of the Premier League soccer team, and he will report directly to the Fenway Sports Group that owns LFC. This will mark the end of his 10-year run at EA, where he most recently oversaw the start of the company’s esports efforts.
GamesBeat has reached out to Moore for a comment, and I’ll update this post with any new information.
For Moore, this move smacks of destiny. He was born in Liverpool 61 years ago, and now he’s returning to run the team that he has never stopped loving. He’s never hid his love for soccer and sports.
“Passion is essential for all of us at Electronic Arts,” EA CEO Andrew Wilson wrote in a blog post. “It’s what gets us up in the morning and drives us to do extraordinary things. And if you’ve ever met Peter Moore, you know that he quite literally wears his passion for Liverpool FC on his sleeve. So it’s with great excitement that we congratulate Peter on following his dream to become the next CEO of his beloved Liverpool Football Club.”
Moore will join Liverpool FC in June. In the meantime, he will continue to oversee EA’s esports initiative. This likely means the industry won’t see him onstage at the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show before he moves back to the United Kingdom.
More started his career in the sneaker business with Reebok. In the ’90s, he went to work with Sega and helped helm the company’s American presence during the Dreamcast era. In 2003, he moved on to Microsoft, where consumers got to know him as the guy who would display tattoos of release dates for Halo 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV on his bicep during media presentations. Whether the Halo tattoo was real or temporary is still not known for sure.
Through all of these jobs, Moore established a reputation as a human being in a world of media-trained corporate automatons. He still never strayed from the company line, which was on display during an early Xbox 360 interview that he did with Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine’s Dan “Shoe” Hsu (who was also GamesBeats editor-in-chief until 2012). The EGM editor pelted Moore with some tough questions that the exec dodge artfully while always managing to seem human.
Now, Liverpool FC has him, and hopefully Moore knows that getting a real soccer team to win the Premier league is slightly more difficult than it is in FIFA 17.
