By common consensus, mastery rests on two pillars: talent and skill. And while the origin of talent — be it God or random genetic flux — is notoriously obscure, the provenance of skill is anything but. If talent is given, like a gift, then skill is made, which is to say that it is work’s reward. Even so, practice rarely has a financial reward. This presents a quandary for any industry built on skilled labor. If skill demands training, but training itself is not profitable, then who is obligated to support the labor of learning until accumulated skill can start to pay for itself?

This is the heart of what’s often called a pipeline problem. Skill-building is time-consuming and expensive, and yet it must take place in order for skilled industries to survive. Until the modern era, apprenticeships largely served this function; these days, student debt does much the same, placing the financial burden (and risk) of training onto individuals rather than employers or society at large. Nursing, sculpting, plumbing, lawyering, aerospace engineering, pastry making, even teaching itself — all of it continues to exist because a viable skill development pipeline has been built for it.

Which brings us to esports. The pipeline problem is felt with particular intensity in professional gaming. This is because succeeding in esports, like all sports, is not simply about meeting accreditation standards (e.g., passing the state bar). Rather, competitive gaming is built on the goal of being better than someone else, meaning that esports dramatizes accumulated skill in ways that most careers do not. So finding — or, really, producing — that top .01% of players that an (e)sport needs to shine requires a kind of pyramid: millions of casual players, thousands of competitive ones, hundreds of elites, and a precious few superstars. As players rise through the ranks, skill inheres in them, making it possible to separate, in the warm glow of stadium lights, the good from the great, the great from elite, and the elite from the legends.

When it comes to making that system sustainable over time, the top and the bottom of the pyramid are the easy part. At the base, most people are playing for fun and don’t need (or expect) compensation; at the top are professionals, who create plenty of value on their own. The hard part is the middle, where we find those who are training to become professionals but who do not produce much value for the teams and tournaments that might otherwise support them — that is, the pipeline to pro. And yet finding a way to support them and their training is essential if potential skill held in every player is to be actualized into professional skill. To put it bluntly, someone has to pay for as many hours of practice as possible.

But whose responsibility that is — players, teams, tournaments, or publishers — is an open question. In some ways, pondering the pipeline problem is a luxury for the esports industry. A decade ago, esports firms were largely concerned with their survival, not their future. And while the stability of that industry can fluctuate, times have changed with the influx of hundreds of millions of dollars in capital investment in the last decade. Even so, the questions the industry faces are as existential as ever: If teams, tournaments, and publishers alike all need great players tomorrow (and they do), how are they to support their development today?

How traditional sports handle it

The easiest way to get your head around esports’ pipeline problem is to look at the ways that traditional sports have “solved” it.

“When you’re talking about team sports — basketball, football, whatever — there’s this natural progression. You have Little League, then small amateur stuff, then high school — or, in Europe, club sports — then college, then semipro, and then pro,” says Michal “Carmac” Blicharz, vice president of pro gaming at the Electronic Sports League, the largest esports tournament organizer in the world. “Every single one of those has a sustainable business model. Whether that’s people — or their parents — paying to play, or the college level doing it through sponsorships, ticket sales, and media rights, each ‘step’ works because it’s large enough [to support itself].”

Consider the NBA. Each season, some 20% of NBA players are rookies. Some are hired away from international conferences or promoted from the G League, but nearly all of them played college basketball at some point. When it comes to talking about basketball, college ball isn’t just a product to enjoy. It’s also a kind of factory, one that creates a constant stream of highly skilled players for the NBA as value and public recognition accrue in the bodies and brands of talented young athletes. The odds aren’t great for players — of the 4,300 or so Division I men’s basketball players who compete in the NCAA, around 50 (i.e., 1 in 75) will go pro — but that’s great news for the NBA, which gets to pluck the best of the best for its own league. What’s more, you can also swap “NCAA” for “NBA” in this equation, given that colleges are also reliant on the new talent that bubbles up from high schools and elite basketball camps across the country.

Viewed as a chain of production, it’s easy to see how the NBA has co-opted the American educational system, turning it into an assembly line that spits out extraordinary athletes at little to no cost to a professional league that needs them to survive. What has made this sustainable for colleges is lucrative television contracts and ticket sales, as well as the relatively recent invention of the “student-athlete” as a legal entity. College athletics are built on the age-old idea of mens sana in corpore sano — a sound mind in a sound body — but, in practice, these high-minded principles conveniently function as a way for universities to deny their athletes the tiniest percentage of the value they create. And as for high schools, well, that’s what tuition or tax dollars are for. Pipeline problem? Solved.

Other sports tackle this differently. Collegiate programs for baseball are widespread, but are markedly less elaborate than those for basketball or football (unlike those “revenue sports,” college baseball programs tend to run in the red). As one result, Major League Baseball relies on an intricate series of feeder leagues, collectively known as the Minors, for player development. Some of these clubs are operated by major league teams — like the Gwinnett Stripers, which is owned by Atlanta Braves parent company Liberty Media — while others sign player development contracts with specific teams. (This is similar to how the European soccer model works. In the 2013-2014 season, 17 of F.C. Barcelona’s 25 starting players came up through the club’s extensive network of youth teams.) The key point here is that major league ballclubs are investing directly into (or, at least, paying for) future talent, rather than skimming it off the top of college programs.

The challenge facing minor league team owners is to make that financially sustainable. Because revenues for the minors are a fraction of those for MLB teams — the average minor league ticket, for example, costs $8 compared to $58 for MLB — many assume these expenditures are just sunk costs for big league organizations. But many farm teams, in fact, generate higher profit margins than MLB clubs by working the other side of the capitalist equation: minimizing expense.

On one hand, minor league teams tend to cluster in cities a few hours’ drive from MLB stadiums, like Chattanooga, Tennessee, or Durham, North Carolina, which, one, keeps land costs low and, two, responds to a demand that isn’t being filled. On the other, minor league baseball pays near poverty wages — as low as $5,500 per player, per season — and MLB has been ruthless in preserving its right to do so. In 2016, the organization lobbied for the shameless Save America’s Pastime Act, which sought to exempt minor league players from minimum-wage requirements on the logic that they are “creative performers.” While the act never passed, its key stipulation wound its way into the 2018 federal budget anyway. A mere 10 percent of players in the minors will touch a major league field, but the system has managed to make itself “sustainable” largely through the minimization of costs.

In broad terms, these two examples speak to the range of techniques that professional sports ecosystems use to solve the pipeline problem: Monetize it, cut costs, and/or make it someone else’s problem. While the relative importance of each varies, virtually every sport relies on some combination of the three to make sure that great players will never be in short supply.

Why esports are different

To see if these approaches hold any validity in esports, I visited ESL’s studios in Burbank, California, to talk with Blicharz and two other industry veterans: Kevin Rosenblatt, ESL’s vice president of product and content, and Trevor Schmidt, vice president at Turtle Entertainment Online. (The European media conglomerate Modern Times Group bought a controlling stake in ESL from its original parent company, Turtle Entertainment, in 2015.)

ESL has been in the esports business since 2000, which puts the company in the advantageous position of having seen professional gaming’s ups and downs on a time scale longer than any one player’s career (or, indeed, than many games’ lifespans). As a result, it’s no exaggeration to say that ESL’s accumulated wisdom on esports, past and present, is likely among the most concentrated in the industry.

Which is not, however, to say that Blicharz, Rosenblatt, and Schmidt are unbiased. Quite the contrary, in fact.

“Here at ESL, we’re a big proponent of open ecosystems,” says Rosenblatt. “We’ve built our business on the philosophy of open ecosystems and that’s what we evangelize.”

What Rosenblatt is referring by “open ecosystem” is one of the biggest divisors in the esports industry: Should game publishers run their own, in-house leagues (e.g., Overwatch League), open their games up to a market of third parties, or pursue some kind of hybrid? That this is a debate at all speaks to what’s likely the biggest difference between esports and sports. No one “owns” baseball; technically speaking, it’s not even a product. You won’t find baseball on a shelf, nor can you download it from Steam. But someone owns Counter-Strike. And Overwatch. And Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. And League of Legends. What that means for pipeline problems is that publishers, ultimately, get to call the shots about how their games’ ecosystems will be designed because of the constraints of intellectual property (not to mention their control over their games’ servers). And those choices shape the terrain on which esports’ stakeholders attempt to solve their pipeline problems.

The active attention publishers now give to esports is a fairly recent development. In the 2000s, most publishers were only vaguely interested in professional gaming, which many saw as a felicitous, but inconsequential, byproduct of well-designed multiplayer games. (In one retrospective on StarCraft: Brood War, a number of Blizzard executives said they were not aware that their game had spawned a professional scene in South Korea until after it became a national phenomenon.) That thinking changed in the 2010s for two reasons. First, the rise of the “games as service” model incentivized publishers to create long-lasting communities that would pay for microtransactions for years, and they understood esports as one way to do so. Two, esports became a valuable product in their own right. At that point, publishers started to exert their IP rights in order to grab a piece of the growing esports pie.

But there was no rule book for how to manage an esport, and publishers came up with a wide range of strategies. These strategies, in turn, set the terms for how publishers, players, teams, and tournaments look at the pipeline problem.

“Publisher support is a continuum,” says Rosenblatt, explaining the distinction between open and closed ecosystems. “It runs from laissez-faire, like Valve [Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive], who basically say, ‘Just let us know what you’re doing and you can create your own products around our IP,’ to the other side, which is the Blizzard and Riot model. They tightly control their IP, and there’s no choice in that market.”

Open and closed ecosystems each have their pros and cons. But from ESL’s perspective, the main problem with closed ecosystems is that they don’t create space for, well, ESL. Without the blessing of a publisher, third-party tournament organizers can’t take part in an esport, let alone the development of talented young players.

But for the open ecosystems that ESL prefers, there are basically three options for making the path from zero to hero sustainable. Not surprisingly, the main difference between them is who pays.

The simplest option is that the players themselves shell out for the privilege to rise through the ranks. The most famous example of this is the ESEA — that’s the E-Sports Entertainment Association League — which is owned and operated by Turtle Entertainment. Since 2003, ESEA has provided a “cheat-free environment” for Counter-Strike (among other games) where aspiring professionals go to prove themselves. In exchange for an $8.99 subscription, players receive access to consistent high-skill matchmaking and anti-cheat software that ensures every game is a fair fight.

Option two is for ESL or another third-party tournament organizer to take on the financial risk of creating an amateur or semi-professional league. Last year, for instance, Peter “PPD” Dager, a top North American Dota 2 player, announced that he was founding the NA Dota Challengers League. (Dager declined to be interviewed for this story.)

“The Challengers League’s goal will be to create a semi-professional league within North America,” a news release announcing the NACDL read. “The league will also be an opportunity for aspiring professional players to earn some income for the hard work they put into the game. Any unsponsored NA Dota 2 team or player that is not presently being paid to play competitively will be eligible.”

The existence of NACDL filled an important gap in the Dota 2 ecosystem. But the tournament-organizer-takes-on-risk concept comes with its own problems, even when its chief executive isn’t busy playing professional Dota 2 on his own team. Top-tier tournament organizers like ESL already have their hands full monetizing high-end competitions, where the star power of players drives viewer engagement. But getting viewers to watch — let alone pay for — second- and third-tier competition is another challenge entirely.

“Esports isn’t mature enough yet,” Schmidt says, when I ask about the barriers to monetization that lower tournaments face. “We haven’t built the expectation amongst the community where people are willing to subsidize the system that way.”

In the end, NACDL ran for three seasons before Dager announced that it would likely not return for a fourth. He didn’t give a reason, though many suspected it was an inability to find adequate sponsors.

The final option for talent development in open ecosystems involves the publisher paying a third-party company like ESL to operate feeder leagues. Blizzard, for example, uses crowdfunding from its War Chest system, as well as its own money, to support regional StarCraft 2 tournaments, like O’Gaming TV’s Nation Wars IV, that might not otherwise be financially viable. That support, in turn, has helped stabilize StarCraft 2’s long-term prospects.

There’s also some evidence to suggest that closed, franchised ecosystems will turn to third-party tournament organizers to take on the responsibility of running development leagues, as Riot Games has done with ESL.

“You can almost predict the future of Overwatch League by looking at what Riot has done,” says Schmidt. While Riot has retained tight control over its premier franchised leagues, the European and North American League Championship Series, it has opened up the second tier of competition to third-party tournament organizers. ESL, for example, has put on its ESL Meisterschaft in Germany since 2015, an important stepping stone for players and teams destined for the EU LCS.

“Without that openness, it’s hard for anyone to develop things — not just esports products, but programs that drive engagement with the platform,” Schmidt adds. “For Overwatch, we just don’t have access to the tools we need to create better offerings that would give aspiring professionals a place to play that [would make] them more interested in playing it.”

Open and closed ecosystems

As you might imagine, advocates of closed ecosystems like the Overwatch League — a group that mostly includes teams, and every game publisher not called Valve — see things differently. Noah Whinston, founder and now the executive chairman of Immortals, which owns and operates Overwatch League’s Los Angeles Valiant, has long been one of the staunchest defenders of closed ecosystems.

“From our perspective, Activision-Blizzard are taking the kind of approach that we like to see,” he said in an interview with Glixel in 2017, just as he was raising capital to pay Overwatch League’s reported $20 million franchise fee. “[Overwatch League] is a top-down structure with a big priority on building long-term partnerships with teams as integral parts of the ecosystem. [...] It’s well-aligned with what we think are effective, long-term ways to build sustainable esports ecosystems.”

As Whinston noted, this system has worked wonders for League of Legends, which remains, after nearly a decade, the most popular esport in the world.

“It’s weird to say given the age discrepancy between the two, but I think the ecosystem in League is significantly more mature than [that of] Dota 2,” Whinston said in that same interview. “You have talent being scouted from every corner of the world, massive waves of immigration from region to region, and much more established and stable professional organizations that make good, long term, permanent partners for publishers.”

Some of the more optimistic teams in League of Legends are even hoping to use player development as a revenue source. In a kind of “house flipping” for esports, many teams now believe that they can actualize raw talents into bankable stars and sell them to the highest bidder.

Though Dota 2 fans fiercely defend the game’s open circuit, Whinston’s observations are not without merit. For all the space it makes for third parties, professional Dota 2, the open ecosystem par excellence, has major problems that threaten its long-term viability. Open ecosystems might have a low barrier for entry by third parties, but that doesn’t automatically make them sustainable. One issue the Dota 2 faces is that, in the absence of a central authority, the financial incentives of the different groups that inhabit the ecosystem — players, teams, tournament organizers, and even Valve itself — have slowly drifted out of alignment. Each of these actors monetizes differently, and those revenue streams often cannibalize one another. For instance, Valve’s own mega-event, The International, often makes any third-party production look puny to fans and players alike.

“[Dota 2 is] a challenging ecosystem that we struggle for relevance in, and, by we, I mean pretty much everyone — or everyone but Valve,” a C-level executive at a major third-party tournament organizer says, speaking on condition of anonymity because their company competes for Valve contracts. “When there’s $20 million on the line, you just can’t compete with that.”

Many team owners, especially those that have invested in franchised systems, are quick to agree that the “openness” of Dota 2 is a cover for chaos.

“Dota 2’s scene isn’t friendly for organizations,” Cloud9 CEO Jack Etienne told Glixel in 2017. “Teams pop up and fall apart and pop up and fall apart; the brands are constantly shifting besides the Chinese teams, which are often run by wealthy billionaires who can afford to do this even though the scene isn’t organization friendly.”

Compared to the messiness of open ecosystems like Dota 2, the highly regulated and carefully designed worlds of Overwatch League and the League Championship Series offer a stability that is appealing to teams and their financiers. Centralization and publisher authority allow for the creation of rules around revenue sharing, minimum salaries, and mutual obligations that may be defined in advance, defusing much of the emergent tension that plagues open ecosystems.

But when it comes to producing new talent, serious problems arise precisely because incentives in closed ecosystems are also out of alignment. And nowhere is this more clear than in Overwatch Contenders, which is billed as a “high-level tournament series for aspiring pro players who dream of ascending to the Overwatch League.” Contenders currently consists of eight regions of eight teams each. Among these, 17 are operated by current Overwatch League organizations, while the rest — especially those outside of the United States — are independently owned.

Last season, Blizzard injected more than $3 million of prize money into the Contenders ecosystem. Per the official rules, players receive a cash payout for victories: Each regular-season win in wealthy sectors like Korea, China, and North America nets players $86 (other regions have lower payouts). Among Overwatch Contenders’ success stories is the Korean outfit Runaway, which was picked up wholesale by Overwatch League expansion team Vancouver Titans. After it won the first split of the Overwatch League’s second season, many now consider it to be the best team in the world.

In the best of all worlds, each of these teams would be a sustainable business in their own right, and it would be clear that Contenders could achieve its intended purpose — preparing players for Overwatch League. Bring up Contenders to the crew at ESL, though, and they’re not shy about diagnosing what they see as a system that is ultimately set up to fail.

“The biggest problem for Contenders is that it’s a standard example of a closed ecosystem,” says Blicharz. “The elite teams are rich, but below that line, there’s no incentive for anyone to invest in it besides Blizzard themselves.” (The gap between rich and poor in Contenders has widened considerably since we began reporting this story, as Activision Blizzard adjusted its prize distribution to favor top teams even more strongly.)

“Let’s say you’re FaZe Clan,” Blicharz continues, referring to the popular North American team known mostly for its Counter-Strike, Fortnite, and Call of Duty squads. “You don’t have a spot in Overwatch League. You want to pay salaries to people in the Contenders systems so that ... what, they can get signed by Boston Uprising? You’re not going to invest into being a farm team for an Overwatch League franchise. The viewership isn’t there, and there are relatively low incentives.”

Deep-pocketed teams like Boston Uprising or NYXL can afford (for now) to take a risk on Contenders. But the majority of teams in Contenders, especially those in less wealthy regions, can’t count on that level of support. In an interview with esports outlet Inven Global, Ethan Liu, general manager of the Taiwanese team Machi Esports, which competes in Overwatch Contenders, spoke frankly of a system that is failing all but the richest teams.

“For a number of Contenders Pacific teams, they’re seen as an amateur team,” Liu said. “If Blizzard really wants to see pro-level development with funding for coaches and training facilities, we need [to] see a little bit of money injected back into the scene instead of having the teams solely rely on themselves. But Contenders viewership isn’t really there because we’re not the main league. [...] What ends up happening is that sponsors lean towards OWL teams, while Contenders teams don’t even get to discuss those options.”

In an ideal world for Activision Blizzard, fan enthusiasm for competitive Overwatch would trickle down to Contenders, attracting sponsors to the second tier of competitive play and making sustainable a pipeline that’s not entirely unlike minor league baseball. But without that viewership, Contenders teams won’t necessarily have the capital they need to support player development. So for every success story like Runaway, there’s at least one more for which Contenders isn’t a pipeline to OWL, but a dead end.

“Based on what we’re hearing from our Contenders teams, the skill gap between OWL and Contenders is widening. It’s not actually getting closer,” Liu told Inven Global. “If OWL is so out of reach, a lot of these Contenders teams may never be able to actually reach the dream goal of making it to OWL.”

“You have a system for the casual and elite,” says Blicharz, summing up his criticisms of Overwatch League’s player development ecosystem. “But who can just jump across this gap? Only the geniuses. It’s as if you had high schools, colleges, and NBA, and you cut college out completely. You’re going to have some high school kids who are good enough, but only a few. That smoothness doesn’t really exist in closed ecosystems.”

Every esport could benefit from a smoother path to the pros, but building one is especially important for franchised esports like Overwatch League because much of their appeal to investors lies in their supposed long-term sustainability. As with the franchised sports ecosystems that inspired its structure, the brand recognition and value of Overwatch League’s teams will theoretically keep growing as long as the league lasts, even as individual players come and go. Paying $20 million or more for a permanent slot in the Overwatch League only makes sense if it’s going to last a decade or more.

But it’s hard to imagine any franchise league or its teams lasting more than a few seasons if they can’t replace retiring players with bright young stars. Someone like the London Spitfire’s Ji-hyeok “birdring” Kim won’t be around forever, and whoever replaces him will need to be as good, if not better. If the Overwatch League and its teams can’t find a way to pull that off, it may enter into a vicious cycle repeated multiple times in esports history: a declining average level of skill creates a less compelling product; a less compelling product means fewer viewers and less revenue; and less revenue means even fewer resources to invest into skill-building.

Downsizing isn’t fatal to decentralized professional circuits like Super Smash Bros. Melee, which can simply scale down its budgets and prize pools as viewers drift to Smash Ultimate. But that option isn’t as available to Overwatch League, which wouldn’t be Overwatch League without its home and away games, fixed number of teams, or purpose-built venues. Taken seriously, the most existential of all the challenges that Overwatch League faces might not be gnawing questions about monetization or new viewership (though those, of course, are very important too). It’s that the next generation of great Overwatch players is busy doing ... well, whatever the hell is happening in Fortnite.

What could be

If it’s any indication of just how thorny it is to imagine what player development in esports will become, Rosenblatt, Blicharz, and Schmidt had, up to this point in our conversation, largely nodded along to each other’s comments. When we asked them to predict the future, though, sharp differences emerged, and the mood shifted. It was as if we were no longer speaking with a trio of employees bound by a shared organizational mission, but three individuals with their own idiosyncratic visions of what esports will (or, maybe, should) become.

For Rosenblatt, the kind of material support that colleges offer — room and board, tutors, and coaches supporting countless hours of practice, made sustainable by the sale of broadcast rights and ticket sales — is ultimately too good a deal to pass up.

“I’m a firm believer that, in the future, aspiring professionals will first play at the collegiate level,” says Rosenblatt. “There will be competitive infrastructure at lots of individual schools, there will be a valuable proposition at individual schools to get people to their college. Colleges will provide esports scholarships then you graduate and play on a pro team.”

To that end, ESL has partnered with college sports conferences, most notably the Big East, while game publishers have wormed their way into high schools through partnerships with third-party groups like PlayVS. Yet while this model — get the educational system to subsidize the talent pipeline — has done wonders for the NFL and the NBA, Blicharz, who is Polish, counters that this system only works in the United States, an anomaly in the broad scheme of athletics worldwide.

“The rest of the globe will not work on that model ever,” he says. “It’s just not how sports work outside of the U.S. If I were to predict, most likely, I think it’ll be the reverse of traditional sports. People will retire into college and then represent them at a high level. That’s because you have 16-year-olds who are ready to go pro, and many peak around then.” (This would not be especially different from today’s model. Excepting those who enter the esports industry or become commentators, coaches, or analysts, many players — even onetime superstars like StarCraft 2’s Ilyes “Stephano” Satouri and Greg “IdrA” Fields — retire into the relative anonymity of collegiate life.)

Schmidt, by contrast, stakes out a more moderate position built around scaling services like ESEA. Universities might find their place into the pro path for esports, he says, but it will vary from region to region and game to game.

“Colleges may wait so long to get their esports programs organized that the scenes will simply pass them by, like in Counter-Strike. And even if they do make themselves an important factor in the U.S., esports is still a global phenomenon. College sports in the United States would still be second fiddle to a global product like ESEA that creates a better path to pro.”

But another option — one that is rarely spoken of — is that no one esport will ever solve the pipeline problem, because most esports don’t stick around long enough to need a pipeline anyway. Before esports are esports, after all, they are video games. They have life spans tied to a consumer product, not a national pastime.

This line of thinking inverts the kind of approaches that Blicharz, Rosenblatt, and Schmitt describe: Here, it is not pipelines that support esports, but rather, specific esports that support ad-hoc pipelines for as long as they’re around. Yet for every esport that succeeds, there are five others — ShootMania, Battleborn, Gigantic, Infinite Crisis, Evolve — that try and fail.

Even among esports that catch on, their shelf life suggests that esports are themselves generational. If the life span of an esport isn’t much longer than a single player’s career, then solving the pipeline problem becomes irrelevant. As Dager put it in a recent Reddit post amid some soul-searching in the Dota 2 community about the game’s future, “When I was in my teens [StarCraft 2] was the big thing in esports. […] I started playing [Dota 2] and lucky me the MOBA became the most popular genre. Now we see Battle Royale games sweeping the world’s attention and new young gamers finding their start into competitive gaming. Next year [...] it will be something else.” (Seemingly every studio in the world is developing its own take on auto chess.)

Perhaps there will someday be an esport that, like many athletic sports, outlives its players and fans — competitive Counter-Strike, after all, is about to enter its third decade of life, and shows few signs of slowing down. But what of the rest? For all the hype that surrounds esports, and for all the effort and expenditure that has gone into making them A Thing, professional gaming can feel strangely weightless, carried along on the electric winds of cyberspace. That ephemerality is made all the more obvious by the resilience of traditional sports in spite (or because of) of their deleterious effects on bodies, sacrificed to satisfy the tenets of the gridiron. In a sense, football is more durable than the bodies of those who play it.

If sports are almost literally larger than life, then perhaps it’s no surprise that they have accrued nearly spiritual significance in a culture in which the influence of organized religion has waned. The rituals surrounding professional sports — the chants, the prayers, the communities of faithful that gather any given Sunday — grant them a kind of permanence, a provisional immortality, as if they are not subject to the contingencies we elsewhere call history. Our rational selves know better, of course; the history of sports is not one of purity and preservation, but contingency and change. Even so, this timelessness of sports can makes it easy to believe that the way they are today is how they have always been, and how they must always be. Why else would have Duke and Kentucky started courting LeBron James Jr. at the ripe age of 11?

“Esports,” since the word first appeared in a press release for the ill-fated Online Gaming Organization in the late 1990s, has always been an aspirational term. Twenty years later, much of that promise has been fulfilled. Money? Esports has it. Audiences? Plenty. Public legitimacy? We’re getting there. Yet now that esports is starting to have a history of its own, it’s becoming apparent that one thing that traditional sports have on their side that esports do not is time — or at least, the right kind of it. For all that binds sports to esports, what distinguishes them most might be their distinctive temporalities: sports, (seemingly) permanent; esports, coming and going as new games emerge and old ones fade away — attuned not to sacred time, but to game industry release cycles. (As Kotaku’s Cecilia D’Anastasio put it, “No one’s made a league for Soccer 2.”) For now, at least, esports do not behave like the sports they could become, but the video games they are and have always been. The proof is in the pipeline.

Correction: The original parent company of ESL and ESEA is Turtle Entertainment, not Turtle Beach. We’ve edited the article to reflect this.