No, they would need the licences for teams and players or they would be doomed from start. Besides, I don't think they could rival either EA or Konami in the gameplay department in a small period of time, sport sims get more complete every year and those studios have experience making them.

Add the community factor. Most football fans (and online comunity) are on PS platforms. With all of those facts, Nintendo is better off paying EA to put FIFA on Nintendo systems or just try to insist on something of their own style like Mario Strikers.

BTW. PES has not been consistantly better than FIFA. I've been a PES player since the PS2 days up until PES2013, and I changed to FIFA in 2014. FIFA just got way better and with more content, beating PES for many years, just with PES2015-16 Konami is "comming back", but at this point for me they do not have much credibility as a studio anymore

Of course they could. They won't though.

EDIT: Oh. You mean one that would sell better. Lol, no.

Honestly, I think it would just be a lot easier for Nintendo to win back support from EA Sports by making the NX easy to port to.

In my opinion, if the Wii U had used a more 3rd Party-friendly architecture, I am pretty sure it would still be getting yearly FIFA and Madden even with a 12 million install base and last gen power.

They did replace call of duty with Splatoon so of course they could replace fifa, with some cute animals or mario

No. FIFA has an almost total dominace of football games. PES may be the little risistance, but it barely does over 1 million. FIFA does like 15 million per year. It also has all the big player licences, and it also has the name "fifa", so no, I doubt they couldn't.

Which Nintendo doesn't need because those people aren't really gamers when it comes down to it.

Nintendo is Nintendo, not ESPN.

You mean FIFA players are not real gamers and only have their systems to play one game? Sorry, but that's a very ignorant thing to say

Besides, those people still buy consoles and FIFA still sells huge amounts of copies which give royalties to console makers. And don't forget the Wii, Nintendos biggest console success, was built arround casual players. 

There are so many ways to turn this around but these jokes weren't funny when people dismissed the Wii and its userbase.