UFC champion Ronda Rousey to appear on cover of EA Sports UFC 2

The UFC women's bantamweight champion will become the first woman to appear as the global lead cover star on an EA Sports title

Ronda Rousey in-game (EA Sports)

Ronda Rousey will appear on the cover of EA UFC 2, the second instalment of the UFC’s official video game.

The UFC women’s bantamweight champion is now set to become the first woman to appear as the global lead cover star on a title by EA Sports, the world’s biggest sports video game developers.

“EA Sports is a cultural barometer to know what’s going on in sports at the moment,” Rousey said following the announcement.

“As a gamer myself, it’s pretty surreal to be on the cover of the game and to have a woman on the cover of a UFC game shows a lot of progress. I’m really happy to be involved with it.”

“It’s the first time a female athlete’s been the lead cover athlete for an EA SPORTS title,” confirmed EA Sports' creative director Brian Hayes.

“It shows how meteoric her rise has been. When we started development on ‘EA UFC 1,’ the women’s bantamweight division didn’t exist in the UFC. We weren’t planning on creating female fighters and then all of a sudden Ronda Rousey came around.

“As a result largely of what she’s accomplished, we’ve gone from when we signed the deal, there was no concept of female fighters in the game, to now there is a female fighter in the cover who is arguably the biggest UFC fighter in the world.”

Rousey will appear alongside one other fighter on the game’s cover, whose identity will be revealed in due course.

The announcement comes prior to Rousey’s title defence against Holly Holm at UFC 193, which will take place at the Etihad Stadium, Melbourne, Australia in the early hours of Sunday morning, GMT.