Aside from the centuries of cultural and societal popularity, the size of football’s global grassroots game comes from a much simpler, universal truth: it’s remarkably low maintenance. Everyone with a ball is a footballer and whether it’s on Hackney Marshes, or one of the 200 Powerleague or Goals centres around the country, you can get a game.
Given the sound of balls and beer guts bouncing off plywood boards can be heard in every town with a population greater than ten, you’d be forgiven for assuming football is the undisputed champion of grassroots sports on these shores – but there’s a rival. For if anyone with a ball is a grassroots footballer; anyone with a controller or a keyboard is a grassroots eSports player.
Having spent years trying to understand it, brands have finally cottoned on to the professional eSports game. Often referred to as the ‘Wild West’, eSports’ commercial landscape is being tamed by huge global prospectors such as Mastercard, Red Bull and Intel, who’ve struck gold in their sponsorships of the very top of the game. There’s very little left unsaid about just how much the professional game is booming, but the speed at which it’s growing provides an interesting opportunity.
Total eSports revenue increased to $655 million in 2017 and Newzoo predict it could eclipse $900 million by the end of 2018, moving to $1.5 billion by 2019-20. This is, understandably, stunningly attractive to sponsors, but with this sort of growth comes a challenge – there are only a few brands big enough to keep up.
Now, for event organisers and game publishers, this is no bad thing – if anything, it’s brilliant – but there are plenty of other brands who will want to get involved with eSports, can add value, but don’t have Coca-Cola budgets. For such brands, it’s time to push ‘start’ on creativity in approaching eSports sponsorship, and the grassroots are there to be harvested.
In the UK alone, there are 12 million PC and console owners, and yet, there are currently no more than 10 UK players in the highest echelons of professional gaming. Move that to a global level where, out of 100 million ‘active’ players of League of Legends, there are only around 150 professionals in the world. To put that into a context with other sports, Arsenal Football Club, when you include women’s teams and youth groups, currently have more players contracted to the club than there are professional gamers worldwide.
Now you might say that this represents a somewhat manipulated statistic, and it is a touch naughty, but it does highlight a truth – there is no sport in the world where the professional part of the game represents such a small minority of the sport’s total following…and yet the gold rush seems solely focused on the cream of the crop.
There is some evidence of brands hitting the fans, rather than the ‘game’ or ‘the players’. Betway have made in-roads into becoming the recognised face of eSports betting, Mattessons Fridge Raiders have positioned themselves as a gamer’s snack and Monster has demonstrated some crossover in their alertness messaging, but fundamentally they touch on eSports’ fandom rather than “am-dom” – the everyday players who aren’t necessarily going to stream the IEM Masters in Katowice.
Let’s look at football for inspiration – the Budweiser ‘Dream Goals’ activation that saw Sunday League players submitting goals to win prizes, resulted in spectacular reach and engagement. It reached 6 million 18-34 year-old males through TV, and achieved 8.5 million views on Budweiser’s social media channels. The most exciting part? There are only 2 million Sunday League football players…there are 12 million grassroots gamers in the UK alone.
So, what can we expect to see? Who will become the first Powerleague of eSports? When we will see our first pub eSports team? Could betting companies create platforms for peer-to-peer betting on the outcome of games? The possibilities are endless – half-term football camps are about developing future players…will a brand take a chance on half-term eSports camps, or after school clubs?
With grass this long, surely it’s only a matter of time until brands start to cut out the professionals and head straight for the amateurs.
The author of this post is Greg Double, Account Director at ESA Member, Synergy
Greg Double
@Dubstep1988
Account Director, Synergy