- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
When I see the 2017 Overwatch World Cup, I can’t help but think of League of Legend’s Rift Rivals tournament.
It’s not because one tournament is better or worse; rather it’s because they demonstrate a fascinating contrast in how to approach international competition in esports.
Blizzard has taken as traditional an approach as possible with its Overwatch World Cup. Players are plucked from their club teams, sorted by nationality and given the dual burden and honour of representing their countries against the rest of the world.
It’s a formula that’s tried and true – after all, FIFA’s football World Cup is one the most storied and successful international competitions in the history of sports.
Multi-discipline esports tournaments, such as the World Cyber Games and World Electronic Sports Games – modeled on the Olympics rather than the World Cup – also had nationality as their basis.
One might ask: what other approaches even exist? Indeed how can you have international competition if you’re not grouping the competitors by nation?
However, you have to look only as far back as last June’s League of Legends (LoL) Rift Rivals to see how esports can create a radically different version of inter-regional competition.
For years LoL publisher Riot has operated regional leagues around the world. Some leagues consist of a single nation, while others encompass a geographical cluster of countries, such as Eastern Europe, Oceania et cetera.
The number of non-resident players allowed per team is strictly regulated, preserving a vague sense of regional identity in each league. Inter-regional club competition is limited to a handful of sanctioned tournaments each year, including the World Championship and the aforementioned Rift Rivals, while meaningful competition between ‘national teams’ is virtually nonexistent.
These various factors combine to create a curious phenomenon when the best club teams from each region collide in these rare inter-regional tournaments. The teams don’t merely represent themselves and their fans alone, they also represent their league, their region and their countries.
It’s a far cry from a traditional sports competitions, such as football’s Champions League. There a club like Chelsea represents Chelsea alone. It would be absurd to suggest they also bear the standard for England or the Premier League. In fact the remainder of Premier League fans are likely to wish for their demise.
In contrast LoL esports has created a concept of strong league loyalty that has no equivalent in traditional sports. North America League of Legends Championship Series’s Team SoloMid may be the recipient of bitter hatred from rival fans in domestic competition, but it is cheered on by fans from all around the North America when it defends the league’s honour in international competition.
At the same time, league loyalty has hardly supplanted regional or national loyalty. Rather, they coexist harmoniously. Each time SK Telecom T1 wins the LoL world championship it’s treated as almost an equal triumph for South Korea, the LCK, and for SKT itself. This doesn’t mean that all fans cheer for teams the same way – there are certainly fans who care only for TSM as a club and fans who only perceive SKT as South Korean – but on the whole, League of Legends has ended up with a competitive environment where the lines between different loyalties have become delightfully blurred.
This unusual ecosystem has some definite benefits over the traditional system of separating club and national competition. Professional players spend the majority of their time training and playing with their club teams, which means the level of play for the ad-hoc national squads can only lag behind in comparison.
LoL sidesteps this problem entirely and guarantees that the world champions are truly the best team in the world. Furthermore, LoL’s environment creates a sense of continuity that pervades an entire competitive season. The world championship does not exist independently from domestic competitions; instead it allows them to culminate in a grand finale.
On the other hand, LoL’s big international competitions have the drawback of being aimed at the fans who have already bought in. It’s unable to fully leverage the power of national pride, which is an almost unmatched force in drawing viewer interest. It’s the force that brings your relatives together – even those who never watch sports – to gather around a television and watch the national team play a World Cup match. You don’t have to explain to your dad why he should root for the USA. It might take some work to convince him to cheer for TSM.
Perhaps as esports grows we will find that there is indeed a right and wrong approach to international competition, but until then it will be interesting to see the path each individual discipline ends up taking as either a custodian or challenger of tradition.