I had an xbox live ultimate account I made during the pandemic.
xbox announced a partnership with EA so that people who had ultimate got access to EA games. OF course the trick is that it links your xbox account with an EAplay account.
Except it wouldn't work. It said I already had an eaplay account. I didn't recall making one but maybe I did a long time ago with that email. I couldn't get it to recover the password. I messaged EA to ask them to delete the ea account so I could make a new one and they said not unless I knew the password of the old one - of course I didn't that was the whole point. I asked them to send a password reset to the associated email and since it was through the xbox thing it wouldn't work. I messaged xbox to ask them what I should do and they didn't know - it was EAs problem not theirs.
So basically the EA partnership thing never worked for me and I never got to play any of their games. It was sort of the beginning of the end of using that service for me as the whole thing was frustrating. I don't think I ever made an EA play account ever, so my assumption is that my email (which has appeared on lists from compromised sites before) was used to try to see if someone could steal my games from EA or something and it ended up putting any account in limbo.
Truthfully I'm sort of ok with it now - I wouldn't give EA my money willingly so being forced away from their games is not that big a sacrifice.