EA Sports apologize to Khabib for religious blunder in UFC game

Bloody Elbow 2.0 | Anton Tabuena

EA Sports apologized to Khabib Nurmagomedov, a devout Muslim, following a religious blunder that gave undefeated fighter a Christian post-fight celebration.

On Sunday evening, Khabib took offence to the new EA Sports UFC game and the way his character was designed to celebrate a victory and immediately took to social media to criticize EA Sports for their error. Following a victory, his character, much like the majority of those in the game, gestured in the form of a cross.

Following some fan outrage on social media, Khabib posted a follow-up image on his Instagram account with an apology from EA Sports directed to his twitter account.

A photo posted by Khabib Nurmagomedov (@khabib_nurmagomedov) on Mar 22, 2016 at 1:38am PDT

Khabib, who accepted the apology, added that the “developers of the game made a mistake. Let’s be honest, every human being makes mistakes, and I’m not holding a grudge. They apologized and promised to fix it. Hopefully the next time they would not the make mistakes like the this, and to take account everybody’s religion.”

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About the author

Karim Zidan

Karim Zidan is a investigative reporter and feature writer focusing on the intersection of sports and politics. He has written for BloodyElbow since 2014 and has served as an associate editor since 2016. He also writes for The New York Times and The Guardian. Karim has been invited to speak about his work at numerous universities, including Princeton, and was a panelist at the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival and the Oslo Freedom Forum. He also participated in the United Nations counter-terrorism conference in 2021. His reporting on Ramzan Kadyrov’s involvement in MMA, much of which was done for Bloody Elbow, has led to numerous award nominations, and was the basis of an award-winning HBO Real Sports documentary.