“A saying that I’ve picked up in the last few months is ‘More than just a game’,” says Brandon Smith, 20, two weeks after commentating at Wembley Stadium for the Carabao Cup final.
“There’s a stereotype over it but I think people need to wake up and see that this is really going somewhere now.”
He’s not talking about, and wasn’t at Wembley to commentate on, football as played by twenty-two living, breathing humans.
He and his co-commentator Richard Buckley were there for a FIFA game played at half-time and shown on the big screens around the stadium.
Esports isn’t just up and coming, it’s already arrived.
It will arrive again, closer to home, this weekend at Media City for the University of Manchester’s fifth annual King of the North esports festival.
There, teams from universities across the UK will compete across three of the biggest games on the esports scene: League of Legends, Overwatch, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (generally shortened to CS:GO).
They all involve working with a small team to beat an opposing side – CS:GO is a traditional first-person shooter; Overwatch is a similar concept but with a bit more of a sci-fi and cartoon-y edge; while League of Legends (or ‘League’, or ‘LoL’) is a slower-paced real-time strategy game.
Previous King of the Norths have attracted 500 to 600 people, both to compete in the university-only events and in tournaments and casual gaming open to the public, and UoM Esport Society’s Tom Watson is hoping for the same again.
“Esports is one of the most rapidly developing industries out there,” he says “Obviously it can’t compete right now with traditional sports but we’re seeing a huge development with the size of the esports scene.
“If you look at the big tournaments you have players competing for millions of pounds and, obviously going up in correlation with that, the viewership is huge.”
Take the Overwatch League, a professional league paying players from across the world a minimum salary of $50,000 a year, whose debut season is currently underway.
According to Sports Business Daily, the popular game-streaming service Twitch paid $90m for the exclusive rights for the league. It’s not quite football’s Premier League money, getting billions for domestic rights alone (Twitch, as an online service, is worldwide), but it’s a hell of a lot of money.
The City of Arlington in Texas recently announced plans to transform the convention centre into an esports stadium.
This year, King of the North will move locations from previous years where it was held at the University of Manchester’s academy venues to the University of Salford’s Orange Tower in Media City.
Members of the public will be able to watch the university teams in action, or play an array of games themselves such as Super Smash Bros, Tekken, and Dragon Ball Z Fighter.
But as well as being able to experience the world of competitive gaming in person, the tournaments will be streamed around the world as well.
“We’re lucky to be partnered with Twitch,” says Watson “so we can put all our King of the North games on there and because we’re partnered with them it means we get their front page.
“That means that while we have hundreds of people at our event we also have thousands watching [on Twitch], which is an absolutely ridiculous number, especially considering we’re doing quite a niche thing.”
A niche thing for sure, but one which is an increasingly large and powerful one. The turn of Smith and Buckley (both students at UCFB’s Etihad Campus) at Wembley may have been a change of pace in terms of English half-time entertainment, but on the Continent it’s a much more familiar thing.
“For example, in Germany if Stuttgart were playing Wolfsburg, the half-time entertainment in England is usually a penalty shoot-out with the mascot or whatever,” says Buckley “In Germany it’d be the FIFA game between the two.”
Indeed, the Premier League is lagging slightly behind its European cousins in embracing esports. Only West Ham United and Manchester City have FIFA players signed up, an occurrence much more common across the Channel.
Ajax, for example, have a set-up much admired in the esports scene, and France have an e-Ligue 1 of their own.
Just a short month after King of the North ends, another major esports event will take place in Manchester, with a FIFA tournament bringing the best players from around the world to the Victoria Warehouse in April.
The FUT Champions Cup – a version of the game where players can put together a team of whichever star players they want – will yield a path towards this year’s FIFA eWorld Cup, as well as prize money in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Though Watson, Smith, and Buckley all spoke about esports as niche interests, never has a niche felt quite so much like it will change the landscape of sport as we know it.
Tickets for the King of the North festival are available online (at uomesports.co.uk) or on the day at Media City £3 each or £10 for 10.
