Author: Jason M. Bailey / Source: New York Times
Jay Goldthwaite had never felt passion for a Boston sports team, no matter how often his neighbors’ cheers pierced the walls of his condo during playoff games for the Red Sox or the Celtics.
But then came the Boston Uprising, a franchise in the Overwatch League whose players shoot it out in a video game to save the world.
Now an autographed team poster is framed on a wall in his home office. During an emergency room visit this year, he used his phone to furtively watch the Uprising in a frenzied match featuring a time-traveling pistoleer, an electricity-wielding scientist and a monk pursuing transcendence.
“I thought it would be sort of a novelty,” Mr. Goldthwaite, 47, said of having a local team to support. “But now I find myself jumping off the couch.”
Competitive e-sports emerged 20 years ago, when a game called StarCraft became an obsession in South Korea and a pillar for Blizzard Entertainment, which also publishes the game Overwatch. Devotion to teams like Evil Geniuses, Team Liquid and Cloud9 developed organically with little regard for geography.
But Blizzard’s parent company, Activision Blizzard, which employs executives who have worked for the N.B.A., the N.F.L., and broadcasters ESPN and Fox Sports, is taking a more deliberate approach.
“Basketball is not a sport,” said Pete Vlastelica, the chief executive of e-sports at Activision Blizzard. “Basketball is a game.
The N.B.A. makes it a sport by wrapping structure and fanfare around it.”The Overwatch League’s inaugural season this year featured 12 teams, and the finals in July attracted sold-out crowds of more than 20,000 spectators to the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, while matches were broadcast on ESPN. Since then, Blizzard has announced expansion franchises in Atlanta, Washington, Paris, Toronto and Vancouver, British Columbia, as well as the Chinese cities of Guangzhou, Chengdu and Hangzhou. The league hopes to ultimately add eight more.
By building local franchises for Overwatch, Blizzard offered a structure that could appeal to professional sports executives able to provide valuable cachet.
The first two franchises, the Boston Uprising and the New York Excelsior, were bought by organizations connected to Robert K. Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, and Jeff Wilpon, chief operating officer of the New York Mets and the son of the team’s principal owner. Executives with the Los Angeles Rams, the Philadelphia Flyers and the Sacramento Kings soon joined the ownership ranks. E-sports stalwarts joined, too: Cloud9 owns the London Spitfire, which won the first championship.
Mr. Kraft’s son Jonathan, president of the Kraft Group, said his organization had been interested in e-sports, but was uncomfortable acquiring what amounted only to contracts with individual players, rather than a permanent franchise.
It was swayed by the pitch for the Overwatch League, which like a professional sports league tracks detailed statistics on teams and players, has a regular broadcast schedule, a postseason, and player transactions. (This off-season, its runner-up for most valuable player was traded to another team.)
“It’s not the wild,…
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