Sports games are literally the worst when it comes to predatory industry bullshit like microtransactions, ad abuse, dlc abuse, and rehashes, and yet the retarded sports game fans keep eating that garbage up.
They are nothing but cucks who have contributed to the degradation of the gaming industry by refusing to boycott shitty business practices.
Correlation =/= Causation. People like sports games for stuff other than gameplay (example: they hate outdated rosters) , as this thread points out. Plus there was more publisher competition & sports didn’t become the national fixation in the 90s as it did in the 2000s.