Although I will quote this since it's nice and close, I'll also go over some other stuff as well. When it comes to the "rosters" this was purely the lineups, not any additional playfaces or any graphical changes. This was just to change to a more up-to-date version of these teams. This is why the options given to everyone at the first load-up were "rosters and lineups", with warnings on them. If it was a graphical change we would have pointed these out in the patch notes. Although we did notice an issue with the Ireland team we did miss a player from the lineup which we will look into.
When it comes to the teams themselves although we did have them licensed, due to the restrictions of covid and actually getting access to certain countries and locations was impossible for us to work a schedule to get these done while countries were in various states of lockdowns.
All of that is understood, but COVID restrictions have been gone or lowered in many areas for a very significant amount of time now.
Despite all of the above explanation and others given, I don't think this is a case of Big Ant doing all they can do. Players, players associations and national governing bodies who make these licensing agreements are not likely to take issue with graphical art teams achieving a better likeness of the subjects by means such as outsourcing. I know licensing agreements can be complex, but all they care about is if it's acquired legally and is a fair and accurate representation of the player.
If Big Ant were to cooperate with the end-user designers and implement their massively better likenesses, there couldn't seriously be an issue. Those end-user designers can simply agree and sign over their work as a donation for which they request no fee.
The problem with that I'm guessing is the potential for those same end users and others to recreate the now "licenced" likenesses as they have done to create them in the first place. Then it would appear the newly licenced likenesses would be available on the academy in an also unlocked version.
The solution to that would be for Big Ant's own designers to make their own graphical tweaks to the base design submitted to them by the end user. Given that they are a supposedly professional team they should be able to improve on the end-users design with little effort, creating a superior and unique version.
I'm not trying to be insulting, but in all honesty many of the current licenced likenesses are nothing more than a travesty. I don't think big ant or any representative of them good seriously say they are proud of the standard of that work.
In all honesty where there's a will there's a way. We are not talking about things that the licensors do not want. We are talking about something I'm 100% sure they do want. They represent their players and I'm sure many of those players would find their current representations nothing more than a joke.
Put simply and inarguably the players and the fans deserve much better than what has been done.