The one thing you get from football gamers, as opposed perhaps to more traditional gamers, is that they love football. They love the sport, they love playing it, watching it, and supporting their team – and that’s what brought them to Fifa. With other games it’s often an escape from real life but the real life alternative to shooting people in Call of Duty is called going to the army, and that’s not a game.
One of the biggest mistakes with eSports is that the word is used as though it’s one sport. It’s like saying “I’m an Olympian”, but you’re not, you’re a high jumper, or a runner, or a weight lifter. An Esports Fifa professional can be a completely different person to a Fortnite or League of Legends professional. It’s as different as a darts player to a gymnast. Fifa is on its own trajectory, separate to many other Esports titles. Sure there’s a lot it can take from other games but perhaps more importantly Fifa needs to learn how to leverage the ‘real-life’ football audience and not compete with it.
It’s not just a load of people playing computer games either. Well it is, but it’s a lot more professional than that. This tournament is different as it’s footballers and not full-time gamers, but in the competitive world it’s serious. These guys have coaches, mental coaches, decent full-time wages, big prize money and they get drugs tested – people might be surprised to learn that.
