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What is a "likeness", though? If you know who it is, through jersey numbers or scrambled names or faces or statistics, it is who it is.
If that's the standard, EA doesn't win.
The first legal question is whether EA's actions prevent the players from pursuing the sport through denying them economic advantages. That's a non-starter, and the courts have been fairly rigid about that.
The second legal question is whether EA's use of likenesses cause a reasonable customer to assume the players have endorsed the product. With that question, you need to look at the advertising and the representations made in the product itself. That might be a tougher question. Since I don't play these games, I can't make a reasonable guess here. Denard Robinson is on the cover of the current game, right? That implies something. I wouldn't grab a picture of Peyton Manning and stick it on the splash screen of FOF, but I have no problem using jersey numbers and player names and team names (not team nicknames, that's a copyright issue).
I'll add that states might consider this a privacy issue. While federal trumps state, these suits can always get messy. Also, with overseas leagues, it's a different ballgame entirely. In many places, using the names is protected.
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