SPECIAL REPORT
A quiet revolution in sport has been taking place for years. Competitive online gaming, or eSports, has been growing exponentially since the mid-1990s.
“It is probably the biggest sport you’ve never heard of,” Wouter Sleijffers, CEO of Excel, one of the biggest British eSports brands, remarked at a gaming industry event in January 2020.
That was, until the COVID-19 pandemic and global lockdown. With the banning of recreational and competitive sport, eSports shifted from being an alternative to the only sport available.
Unless you are, or live with, a teenage boy, eSport is unlikely to have been much on your radar before this year. But competitive online gaming is massive, both in terms of participation numbers and spectators. Last year 100 million people watched the World Championships of League of Legends, a team strategy game (the US Superbowl pulls in around 98 million viewers). Enormous stadia host eSports events in front of live audiences in countries as diverse as South Korea and Poland, and top professional players can command
