this is 800 words, if you don't like reading you won't like this
Manchester City are bigger but Fnatic are Better
It was all over bar the shouting. A superteam versus what should have been their closest competitor but on the night nothing more than a canvas. The pundits cooing, fans relaxed, players mentally preparing their twitter post while still performing at a level beyond 99% of the general population. Anyone who then switched over to watch the football would have had another 90 minutes of the same, apart from the team jerseys. And while comparing Haaland's headers to Derke's headshots still feels a little ridiculous to me, it is only because I was raised to view video games as, well, games. Executives in all parts of the esports hope that generation alpha will have no such aversion. They may well be onto something.
One the one side, we have City. This was a football club that has since become, by and large, a soft power vehicle. A monarchy, for a state with a king too unpopular to be a tourist attraction. Sheikh Mansour has done an excellent job, convincing the world's greatest coach to live in the UK, then simply providing him whatever he desires. The end product is the most expensive, most expansive team in the world, with a world cup winning striker only a substitute. They're on for three major trophies this season, yet the real prize was won last winter: Messi in a bisht. The world's attention on the Arabian peninsula for something other than war, or the deaths of migrant workers, or OPEC disputes.
On the other is Fnatic, more specifically their Valorant side. Just as dominant, just as pleasing on the eye to watch but with polar opposite optics. The players are also the best available but are likable to a fault, with backstories that are genuinely inspiring and unique. There is a captain who spent his 'prime' vlogging for a league of legends team, grinding to stay in the industry and finding his feet at the top. The 17 year old prodigy who had to ask his teammates not to bang the surfaces when they win, lest they stir anxiety borne from the earthquakes in his hometown. The 5 make decent money, but noone had parents pushing them into this career for the money. There were no summer camps at 5 years old, Valorant academies at 9 and professional contracts at 13. The result is 5 well adjusted people who are crowd favourites despite winning 19 games in a row. Tom Brady would have killed for this. IPIC could well do.
In a world where mainstream sport has been commodified, politicised and marketed to a mind numbing degree Fnatic, and tacFPS as a whole, is now a truer definition of the word than what 52000 went to see at the Etihad stadium tonight. Where else can you find such a complex contest, a battle of wits over 7 different shaped chess boards, that has the action of a great F1 race? Nowhere physically, and that is why stadiums sell out for majors and why hundreds of thousands will happily watch someone watch someone else play a videogame, to the bafflement of most people over a certain age. Esports is still in it's amateur era, much like traditional sports in the 1800's, but available to the international rather than domestic masses. People fly the white horse in Sau Paulo and Stockholm alike - the potential is alluring to even the most risk averse investor.
And herein lies the problem. Every intuition points towards this thing being big in the future. American VCs spent most of the 2010's piling cash into esports teams, wanting that future, that 140 years of cultural development, within one economic cycle. It would be like buying a mining town's football club in the Victorian era and then being surprised at your merchandise not selling like Ronaldinho's. The other half of the problem is that games are maintained by a firm, as opposed to the communities who play them. There are no player unions, only associations with superficial power. If the East India Company had sole ownership of every football field, would the game be as ubiquitous as it is today? This issue is not solvable in one article.
The uncertain future fades to nothing when I watch a match though, be it VCT or a CS major, or any other open tournament. I nod sagely at the pregame analysis, laugh at the mistakes and cheer for at least one of the teams, when neutral usually both. When it comes to taking my mind off things, nothing even comes close - especially if Paper Rex are playing. And while riot games is a Tencent subsidiary, Boaster won't be wearing a hanfu in Xinjiang province for a good long while yet. By the time someone does, I'll probably be so old I'll forget it the next day.
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