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Former Lagardère Sports executives Nicolas Gaede and Ulrik Ruhnau have left the company to launch their own sports consultancy called CSIGHT. While the company will position itself as a sports agency, CSIGHT will also work in the esports space.
Gaede served as the SVP of esports for Lagardère for nearly 18 months before his departure, while Ruhnau’s most recent position was that of EVP stadiums & arenas. Both Gaede and Ruhnau had previously held roughly decade-long tenures at sports rights marketing agency Sportfive, which was acquired by the Lagardère Group in 2006.
Over the last year, Lagardère Sports secured partnerships with a number of teams and leagues including a multiyear deal with the League of Legends European Championship (LEC), T1 Entertainment & Sports, the BLAST Pro Series, top Singaporean organization Team Flash, and PUBG Corp. for both the Nations Cup and PUBG Global Championship.
Gaede provided the following statement to The Esports Observer:
“Having spent more than a decade in the sports & entertainment business – first 10 years predominantly in European football and [the] last three years mainly in esports – some key learnings became more and more obvious to me:
- Sports & esports industry are not identical and do not work the same way.
- But they have a lot in common and they get more and more intertwined (occasionally as partners, investors, or even competitors).
- They can learn and benefit a lot from each other (as long as they’re open to it).
- They both do have their own specific strategic deficiencies on all stakeholders side.
These learnings combined with the experience we made, that you really need to understand the business in order to support and consult it in a relevant and efficient way motivated us to create CSIGHT – a strategic management consultancy from the Sports and esports business for the Sports and esports business.”
