AGORACOM Small-cap Investor Relations Blog

• The best gamers have millions who follow their lives. Images of Faker, a 21-year-old bespectacled South Korean described as the Michael Jordan of League Of Legends (a multiplayer online battle arena)
• They make millions through prizes, appearance fees or merchandise. They have fans and fan clubs who sing about and chant names of star players. There are transfers between teams.

I recently took the 256 bus from Urmston, via Stretford, to Old Trafford. I was on that bus frequently as a kid and it was packed with equally young, local Manchester United fans who paid to stand on the terraces which covered all four sides of Old Trafford. The bus trip was part of the day, a raucous experience, be it mixing with fellow fans, people from other schools or goading stray away fans from the safety of the upper deck.

As I got off the 256 outside the Bishop Blaize pub on my way to watch United beat Everton, the only other passengers disembarking were five stadium catering staff. There wasn’t a single United fan.

Old Trafford has been expanded, but it’s still full for every league game and going to games is not accessible like it was. The average age of the fan has increased steadily since the Taylor Report. You still see kids at games, but they’re not the unaccompanied gangs of yore, but shepherded by an adult into the family stand. The rest of the stadium is populated largely by the middle-aged onwards

United are hamstrung as they can’t turf fans out for being old, though the club do work hard to offer tickets for cup games where demand is lower. Having established that the average age of an MUTV viewer is 53, they’re also trying to attract younger fans to a new app.

It’s not just United. A friend who stood on the terraces at his beloved AFC Wimbledon last week was struck by the profile of those around him.

“They were all old men,” he stated. “The hardcore, the faithful. I’m a bit worried about our prospects at our new home if we don’t attract more young people.”

Wimbledon have been an incredible success, but they attract crowds of 4,000 in a division where Bradford average 20,000, Portsmouth 17,000, Charlton and Blackburn 11,000. Without a benefactor, Wimbledon are doing well to be where they are, even if there’s a lack of goals and great games. My friend suspected that younger people had more exciting pursuits to occupy their time.

There are alternatives. I grew up in a football city where if you were into football, you either played it or you went to support your team. Or you did both. If you didn’t go to games then you weren’t considered a proper football fan, and televised games were few and not a substitute for the real thing.

Now, most people who support Manchester United don’t go to games. There’s been a gigantic shift, with United’s global support watching every kick on screens of varying sizes. There’s no need to miss a game. While televised football was once considered a grievous threat to match-going attendances, now it barely matters.

Far more people are watching football, both in person and televised, than ever before. Compare the average attendances from 1986 to today’s. Manchester United’s was 46,321 (now 75,027), Manchester City’s 24,299 (52,268), Liverpool‘s 35,271 (53,191), Arsenal‘s 23,824 (59,290), Chelsea‘s 21,984 (41,501) and Tottenham‘s 20,859 (70,724).

English football is incredibly popular, stadiums continue to expand, thanks mainly to lucrative television deals. There are three fifth-tier teams with average crowds above 4,000 – it’s unheard of outside England. But are the kids attending? And, if not, what else are they doing?

I was recently asked to host an interview on eSports in Lisbon with Sam Mathews, the founder and chairman of something called Fnatic. A Melbourne-raised Shoreditch resident, Mathews’ Fnatic has been called the Manchester United of its genre with its Counter-Strike team former world champions. The team even has a coach.

I’d never heard of it, nor knew much of eSports or eGamers – a phrase Sam quickly corrected me as a no-no, suggesting that eAthletes was more appropriate.

Athletes? It was explained that while they might not be running around a field, they were showing skills in other ways, through co-ordination, daring moves against rivals, practice and dedication. They were bringing joy to millions, too.

I assumed that people who played a lot of computer games were pasty-faced geeks who struggled with real-life social interaction. I was in for a surprise, but the interview brief seemed ridiculous. “Can eSports franchises build a brand similar to that of Real Madrid and Manchester United?”

The interview was on a stage in front of 900 seats at the Lisbon Web Summit. All appeared taken. The crowd were asked if they’d heard of Manchester United. Almost all raised their hands. Then they were asked if they’d heard of Fnatic. A similar number raised their hands.

Sam explained how 60,000 had recently watched an eSports event at Beijing’s iconic Bird Nest stadium. I struggled to get my head around why anyone would travel to watch people play computer games, but I was the odd one out here.

The best gamers have millions who follow their lives. Images of Faker, a 21-year-old bespectacled South Korean described as the Michael Jordan of League Of Legends (a multiplayer online battle arena), sobbing after an unexpected defeat last year brought an outpouring of emotion and sympathy from millions.

They make millions through prizes, appearance fees or merchandise. They have fans and fan clubs who sing about and chant names of star players. There are transfers between teams.

This phenomenon has largely escaped the mainstream – eAthletes don’t make the news or the covers of magazines, which tend to go for real-world stories. But the mainstream is now sitting up and taking notice. Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain are among two of the clubs now employing professional eAthletes. There’s an alternate Dutch Eredivisie for gamers.

Thirty million watched the 2016 League Of Legends World Championship, where the winners took $2.68 million in prize money. Little wonder mainstream television channels want a piece. The people behind LA’s bid for the 2024 Olympics considered proposing eSports for inclusion.

Interview over, it was time to hear other views when I spoke to eSport fans. They wanted to know what was the big deal about paying £40 to sit in the cold and see one goal in 90 minutes at a conventional football game?

I imagined being a 10-year-old being taken to watch Louis van Gaal’s Manchester United. I’d probably have been back on Space Invaders as quickly as possible.

Other eSport advocates talked of their communities, their friendships with people around the world; technology has allowed that, though the virtual and real seem to blur. Isn’t that the same in other areas of life, when people are registered on forums under pseudonyms? United, along with several other top clubs, are trialling virtual reality in training sessions.

The eSport fans were also curious to know what was so great about travelling hundreds of miles to watch a game that had been switched for the benefit of television? And when I talked of how unhealthy it must be to spend ten franchises’ hours a day in front of a screen, they pointed out that football fans were hardly renowned for being paragons of health.

Where there’s mass interest, money will follow. The biggest Korean firms already sponsor teams of professional eAthletes. The last two championships have been staged in Los Angeles. It’s accessible, fast improving, attractive, well marketed and a threat to conventional, professional sport games such as football, cricket, baseball, boxing or rugby – sports conceived in England and exported via the British Empire. Who’s to say there shouldn’t be new mass appeal sports?

Anyway, for me – admittedly in my forties and fitting the demographic perfectly – the buzz is from anticipating everything that goes with Newcastle at home on Saturday. Should I get the bus or the tram? And those paper fanzines need protecting if it rains.

Source: http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/are-esports-going-to-replace-the-beautiful-game