Excluding things like yelling, doing the wave, or hitting noise sticks together, for the fans, sports are a passive experience. The fans have no real way to interact with a sport to determine a game’s outcome. A person playing a soccer video game has control of one of the teams and their inputs determine how well that team does.

A news organization can play a clip of a soccer game and the experience is not that different than watching the game live. It’s not even that different from being at a stadium, besides being quieter.

If a news organization played a clip of someone playing a soccer video game they would run into a problem. While the graphics might be impressive, the interactive nature of the video game is completely lost on the viewer. The news viewers seeing that clip aren’t experiencing controlling a soccer team. edit: The experience would not even be that different from watching a clip of a real soccer game.

Video games have to be experienced firsthand. People who have never played video games or barely played video games probably aren’t going to get it when shown a secondhand account.