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EA's Peter Moore is leaving to run his favorite soccer team

EA's Peter Moore is leaving to run his favorite soccer team

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He’ll be Liverpool’s new CEO

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Longtime gaming industry leader Peter Moore is leaving his position at Electronic Arts to take on a different kind of gaming: professional soccer.

Moore, who currently runs EA’s e-sports division, will soon take over as CEO of the Liverpool Football Club — a team he’s long been a huge and outspoken fan of — the club announced today.

That Moore is a Liverpool fan is no secret to anyone who’s watched him on stage during EA’s E3 press conferences, where he has a habit of bringing up the team, even when it’s not directly relevant to the subject at hand. With his new job, he’ll finally have an excuse to gush about the team all he wants.

Moore’s Twitter profile says “live and die for Liverpool FC”

EA says that Moore will be sticking around in his current position for at least a few more weeks. He’ll then move to Liverpool and take over as the club’s CEO in June.

“Peter has built a fantastic team that is now running dozens of global tournaments and events with millions of players,” EA CEO Andrew Wilson writes in a blog post. “With more exciting expansion plans on the horizon, Peter will be working with the teams to drive a leadership transition before he returns to the UK this summer.”

Moore was hired by EA back in 2007 to run its sports division. In 2011, he shifted into the company’s chief operating officer role. And in 2015, he became the company’s “chief competition officer,” in charge of EA’s movement into e-sports.

He’s had a storied career in gaming even before moving to EA. Prior to that, he worked at Microsoft as a marketing leader, where he helped to launch the Xbox 360 and drummed up excitement for Halo 2 by getting a supposedly permanent tattoo (that kind of looked like marker scribblings) of the game’s release date on his arm.

Moore ran Sega’s American arm before that, during the Dreamcast era. He came there by way of Reebok, where he’d done marketing for soccer and rugby products.

That means we’ve likely seen the last of Moore in the gaming industry — for a while, at least — but the new position seems to be the culmination of his work over the last two decades: from soccer gear, to sports games, to an actual club.