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Sport for Business
Sport for Business
Gaming's Next Frontier - Alban Dechelotte of G2 Esports
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The gaming revolution is reshaping entertainment, competition, and global business, and G2 Esports CEO Alban Dechelotte is at the forefront of this transformation.
With gaming now engaging 3.2 billion players worldwide, this episode offers a fascinating glimpse into an industry that has grown from niche entertainment to global phenomenon.
Dechelotte shares remarkable insights from his journey from traditional sports sponsorship at Coca-Cola to leading one of esports' most successful organisations. G2 has claimed 12 of 16 League of Legends European championships and built a fanbase that rivals Champions League football clubs on social media - all within just ten years.
What makes this conversation particularly compelling is Dechelotte's vision of convergence between traditional sports and gaming.
G2 has already expanded into football, with ambitions to enter rugby and other sports. Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee prepares for its inaugural Olympic Esports Games in 2027, signalling gaming's mainstream acceptance.
The episode explores how esports organisations approach talent development, combining cutting-edge performance science with traditional coaching methods.
G2 maintains as many coaching staff as players, focusing on both technical skills and psychological wellbeing. Testing at Red Bull's athletic center has revealed that top esports players demonstrate faster reaction times than Formula One drivers in specific assessments.
Perhaps most intriguing is how gaming's business model contrasts with traditional sports. While established leagues increasingly rely on exclusive media rights and paywalls, esports has democratised distribution, allowing multiple broadcast sources and helping viewership quadruple in recent years.
Whether you're a gaming enthusiast, sports business professional, or simply curious about the future of entertainment, this episode provides essential context for understanding how digital competition is reshaping global culture. Subscribe now and join us next week as we continue exploring gaming and esports with interviews featuring industry leaders from Fenix Gaming and Riot Games.
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Our upcoming live events on Future Proofing Irish Sport, Children and Sport and Sport for Social Good, as well as plenty more, are live on the Sport for Business website, and we'd love to have you join us.
Hello and welcome to the Sport for Business podcast. I'm your host, rob Hartnett, and today we are diving in for the first in a short series of interviews exploring the world of gaming and esports. Alban Dishonored alban desilat, is the ceo of g2 esports. It is a company that was formed 10 years ago and has already established itself as being the biggest beast in an industry which is now worth conservative 4.8 billion, with 3.2 billion gamers taking part in the games around the world. There are blockbuster tournaments like the eSports World Cup and the inaugural Olympics eSports Games, which will take place in 2027. He has been one of the key movers within the IOC for introducing esports into the world. He previously worked with Coca-Cola, with Havas Sports and Entertainment and with Riot Games looking after their commercial side here in Europe. It's a fascinating discussion and we got right into it with the question of what good looks like in relation to esports.
Speaker 2:I think it's probably, at least from my point of view, a question of what good looks like. Yeah, what good looks like. I think having 105 million people watching live the final of League of Legends World Final is okay for a very young sports, you know.
Speaker 1:Oh absolutely.
Speaker 2:So the question is like what are we comparing it to? You know, I remember when I was like working for Coca-Cola, I did organize some watch parties in cinemas and we fill up some cinemas with ticketed events in dublin. So the people are there, they are not on tv, they are not in the press. Yeah, they are not talked about by their parents or grandparents, but they do it and so. So the question is like okay, if we look at the criteria of like traditional sport, business, linear distribution, media rights, stadiums, hospitality boxes yeah, it's not yet there, but it doesn't mean it's not there.
Speaker 1:You know yeah, yeah, yeah, it's just different criteria.
Speaker 2:Like I wish, my football club Marseille will have more followers on social media and a higher viewership on their broadcast on Twitch and YouTube, but right now, g2, my team is much bigger than a Champions League club on these social channels, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you've moved into the real world of traditional sport as well.
Speaker 2:Look, I come from there, so for me it's kind of a different. It's more coming to come back. You know, I worked 20 years in traditional sports olympics, fifa, world cup, ufa, advising, coca-cola, louis vuitton, orange, adidas so it's not a unknown world for me. What is interesting is, like you know where we're going to be in 30 years. You know, and I think right now there's a question for traditional sports around how much traditional media rights are a poison for the future of the sports. Like, if you want to increase your revenues, you have to increase significantly the numbers of games which we know in football, for example, it becomes a bit saturated. We have to increase your revenues. You have to increase significantly the numbers of games which we know in football, for example, it becomes a bit saturated. We have to increase the numbers of platforms, which splits the viewership, and you have to add some paywalls or some exclusivity gates that prevent fans that don't have the money to access the private sports. Is it going to win long term? Not sure. I mean, so far it's winning, so far it's big money. But what is right for the sports long-term?
Speaker 2:I personally believe that the model where the broadcast of your favorite sports is free to watch anywhere, any platform, any languages, even an influencer that I like, that has a certain tone of voice that I like. I prefer watching this over a Polish official broadcast. I can do it today because esports is structured in a way that it's mostly owned by the publishers of the world, like Riot Games or Activision or Blizzard or Ubisoft, and they see esports as a marketing vehicle, as a promotional tool for the community. So they don't get it. They don't try to monetize the rights, they try to increase the distribution. That model I love. That model I think has a long-term value for the sports, you know. So that's why I'm saying, yeah, we're not mainstream, but do we need to be? Because there's very few sports that people watch that they never played before. You know, yeah, and so it's the same for us. We have only something like 18 million players of League of Legends in Europe right now. It's not 100, but it's 18. It's not too bad, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very much so, and they're paying to play, so they're you know there is a very strong revenue model in there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, gaming is doing fine. Gaming is much bigger than music and movie industry combined. It's growing double digit every year. There's new region opening doors, like Africa, middle East. There's new region opening doors, like Africa, middle East. There's new platforms, there's new IP. Gaming is doing okay. I think we have always to make a difference and we have to make sure people understand that there's gaming and there's esports, similar to there's running and there's track and field. Yeah, everybody go running in the street, but how many people compete on the track and how people do watch the track and field competition, kind of similar to golf and and and skiing that have a huge base and a very limited amount of people that are so passionate that they want to see the best athlete of the world competing. Gaming and esports is kind of the same. Of course, the potential of growth of the sports is huge because the practice is huge yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And and tell me, like, how important is. It's a very low barrier to entry for somebody who is a gamer to actually participate, to play traditional sports there has to be a club. There has to be a club, there has to be organized. You know you have to meet up with friends, you have to go to a physical location, whereas the barrier to entry for actually just getting on and playing games is much lower. How important has that been in terms of its growth amongst that younger demographic initially, which is now rolling into, you know, into pretty much every age range?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I don't know, because what you talk about now is like the path from zero to hero. You know this mythical journey from grassroots to pro. And it's true that in gaming and esports we have an amazing opportunity that everybody, anywhere, can connect a keyboard, connect a mouse, play, be the best in the world, be discovered very easily by professional clubs and become professional in less than a year. That's mythical and that's much faster, much quicker, quicker, much easier than any traditional sports in the world, because of the discoverability and the accessibility.
Speaker 2:Now you ask me in terms of practice and again I have to make the difference between competition and practice yeah, in practice. Yeah, it's accessible, but is it a reason for people to play? I don't know. There's many reasons to play. There's a reason which is like I just want to have.
Speaker 2:I'm very competitive, I want to confront myself to the best player in the world. There's a leisure, I want to have a good time and I don't care actually if it's competitive or not. Actually, I want to play with like low competitive people because I just want to have fun and there's like a lot of platform where it's just a social thing. You know, we were hanging out, probably in a pub playing darts and they hang it out in a you know in a room of fortnight where between friends they meet together in a virtual room every evening after class and then together they decide which game they're going to play today. And it's kind of like a mix of a social media and a social room where virtually they're going to get together with their friends, and in that case I would say the game is irrelevant, like the actual discipline they're going to practice together is quite irrelevant. The fantastic experience for them is to be together without being physically together.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense and the technology is so widely available now and connectivity has just exploded, so there's no real barrier to entry for most parts of the world now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when I was a kid or a teen, when video game like first interactive in my life, you needed to go to a place where the console was there to be able to play with your friends. So the friend that has a console and the disc to play become the center of gravity of a community, you know, because you want to play the game. Then suddenly it became the PC and then the PC are interconnected and then suddenly it became the phone and then you have it in your pocket, you know. So I think for sure the evolution of technology, the platforms, have a huge impact for gaming, but also for esports. As you mentioned, historical competition of like esports existed the first day gaming existed, because eSports fundamentally is people that don't play that watch other people playing.
Speaker 2:If you go to an arcade even today, the small arcade that exists left there's always one guy playing and two guys watching, you know. And so when you go to space invader, six months after the start of the game you had a world championship in las vegas and the winner earned a subscription to rolling stone as a newspaper that he could get as a bonus. You know, the prize money have slightly increased since then, you know, yeah, but the participation, the level of competition also have improved. So so I think competition has always existed. Now it's about the scale.
Speaker 2:We don't need to be in the same place to play together. We can play remote. We can confront not only your brother or your friend, but you can be the best in your town, in your country, in the world, just by playing a game online. And, similarly to the practice, the watching experience has evolved. You have to be in the room to watch the competition at the beginning. Now you can just go on Twitch or YouTube and there will be people sharing with you live the screen of the competition happening right now somewhere in the world, in the game you like. So technology has enabled acceleration on both sides participation and the viewing experience.
Speaker 1:Do you think it was important in that development of Twitch as opposed to YouTube that you've actually got multiple ways of owning this?
Speaker 2:What I would say is that, in the foundation of the distribution of the broadcast, this idea like multiply source of content is very important. Yes, and I think it's. Uh, it's one of the big difference. Like, like, first thing that traditional sport business agencies or the traditional sports world try to do is to centralize all the rights to monetize them under exclusive distribution. You know Well, guess what? In esports we did the opposite. We democratized the distribution, we offered people that are popular and influential to broadcast themselves commenting the game, and that has enabled the viewership of esports to quadruple in the last few years, while sports is probably not growing as fast anymore yeah, I wanted.
Speaker 1:I want to look forward as to where you imagine that both gaming and esports and your own business is going. But let's let me just take you back a little bit. First, what was your personal first experience of gaming?
Speaker 2:so. So I was a rugby player. I play underage national team, so I'm not a gamer. I was not a gamer. I played FIFA and general rugby, you know. So that was a sport simulation, that was an extension of my passion for the sports. And then, a few years later, me as leader of sponsorship for Coke in Europe.
Speaker 2:I look at gaming as like a platform, as a way to connect with a younger audience through their passion point, the same way Coca-Cola has done it in music and in football for a hundred years, you know. And so I just saw that as an opportunity to connect. And the only thing is that at Coca-cola, we had this vision of like people don't come to the stadium to watch banners, they come to the stadium to watch the sports, to to watch their favorite team. So, as a brand, if you want to enter that stadium and be part of the show and be part of the experience, you better bring champagne, you know. And so the champagne for me is like trying to create value for the experience of the fans through the partnership, instead of like having just like stickers on the jersey, you know.
Speaker 2:And so that's, that's what I, that's my first experience is like I discovered gaming through the lens of a brand that wants to interact with fans for their passion point and then, like, I think, a normal or good market here. I like to eat my dog food, you know. So I start to play video games to understand what they were playing, you know. And so now fast track, 12 years later, because I find I think I signed my first partnership right in 2012. Well, I'm a converted gamer. Now I got the bug. You know, I play. I make time to play video games in my weekend because now I have friends, because I'm competitive from sports and I like to be competitive in gaming too. So my first experience was as a sponsor and now I'm an owner of a professional esports club, but I'm also a converted gamer.
Speaker 1:It is interesting, though, isn't it? Because in traditional sports sport if you were, if you're involved in the administration of clubs and the sports and the international federations and everything you're basing your passion on something you did when you were younger and then you moved on into the world, but you're not able to actually do it. You're not experiencing the sport in the way that the next generation are, whereas in gaming, you can.
Speaker 2:Yes, and I'll go one click further. In traditional sports, a lot of the fundamentals, starting point for passion is transmission. Your dad, your mom, introduced you to sports through watching or playing.
Speaker 2:we don't have this because my parents didn't have video games in their life, you know yeah so we are a first or second generation players of a passion point that didn't exist for our parents. Most of the time, if we play video games, our parents will say what are you wasting your time? Like djs, electronic music, art, rock, like points? To be fair, that happened in the past and so we are not in a moment where the kids can introduce, I mean they can try to educate or share their passion with their parents, like anybody does, you know. But the reality we are just at the beginning of a cycle where, after 25 years of esports, now the first, the pioneers of esports are starting to have kids, and so there are more and more events now where parents come with the kids to the events.
Speaker 2:And that is exciting for me, because not only gaming and esports is a passion point that mechanically you don't need to stop after 30 or 40. After 35, I couldn't play rugby anymore because my body couldn't allow me, but I can play video games as long as I want. So not only it's a sports or sorry, a discipline or a passion point that doesn't have really like physical barrier at the end of your career, but at the same time we're just starting the the fantastic process where the parents are initiating their kids. So that's why I'm very confident the long-term goal and the long-term growth of the sports, because right now our average viewers is 25 years old. If you compare it to football, which is probably 51 or 52 is, it's a much better position today. But we also have the chance that we're not losing fans when they can't play the sports anymore because there's no physical barrier and we're going to start to have this second generation, third generation of transmission that gaming never had in the past.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it is. There is an importance in terms of the ability of the people who are actually guiding an industry and a sport to actually be very much able to actually go home and play that sport as well, because that doesn't happen in FIFA or World Rugby or the International Cricket Council or anything like that. Tell me a little bit about where G2 Esports actually sort of grew out of, and what was it that attracted you towards thinking that this is something that I want to bring my experience, my brand awareness, my passion for gaming into.
Speaker 2:So G2 was founded by two executives. One was an ex-professional esports player from Spain and the other one was a multi-entrepreneur in gaming and esports that decided that he would want to have a club too. And so we have a German and a Spanish bringing their bull flare, creating like a club with the ambition which was from the get-go, to create the equivalent of the Real Madrid of esports. So if you define Real Madrid, it's like fantastic track record in terms of competitive success, iconic brand with global reach and a unique legacy, a unique brand tone of voice, which, in the case of Real Madrid, is about the star and the prestige, iconicity, the white jersey. In the case of G2, it's more the entertainers. You know we are much more in this positioning and unique tone of voice, much more on the entertainment side than anything else. So that was the vision. We are crossing the 10 years old of G2 this year on the 15th of October. There's no other team in the world that won more trophies than us in the last 5 years. We have the only organization in the world that qualified for the 3 global events of the 3 biggest games this year. So we have this kind of competitive success. We are very popular I mean probably most popular team in Europe, top three in US, top five in China. So we have accomplished this level of like popularity and we have this unique twist that people you know tell us like, yeah, but that's G2. You can't understand they are. They are different, you know so. So that's that's who we are in. This ecosystem is like one of the big clubs with a very special twist. We don't win everything, because there's no sports in the world where one club will win every single year for the last 100 years. But if you look at League of Legends, which is a big game, if you look at Europe, out of 16 finals we won 12, which is probably more than Real Madrid did with Champions League. So that's who we are.
Speaker 2:Where it comes from for me is very basic. I didn't go pro. So since 18, when I went back to the school saying, okay, I'm not going to go pro on the field, my only dream was to go pro on the other side of the fence and my interview at the business school, I said look, you are the last chance I have to work for my passion. Give me the school and I can become the ceo of a rugby club. And so I was 20 years old, 30 years old, after working 10 years for the coke of the world and sponsorship and everything is like, okay, rugby is really small. So I want to be a ceo of a football club now and that's kind of like the evolution of my dream job. And you know, I I crossed 40 years old a few years ago and now I'm the ceo of an export club. So I just accomplished my dream. I work in my dream job.
Speaker 2:The context, the format, the discipline has slightly evolved, but my vision is that G2 will be the first club that will bridge sports and esports. We already started with a football team this year and I don't see a reason why, with what we bring to the fans and the variety of a club we have in different disciplines of gaming, why we will not be able to one day compete in football, one day compete in rugby and, you know, represent their favorite club in a very different way than the traditional sports club did in the past yeah, and for people who think that's crazy, you just look at red bull and red bull have come from a totally different space and they have expanded out into adventure sport, into motor sport, into football, into all of the other areas.
Speaker 2:Exactly so I think, with our niche, growing sport called esports. Now we have roughly 40 million fans from all over the world. There's a lot of football clubs that don't have this. So the only difference is that if you look at traditional football clubs let's say FC Barcelona it's one city, one stadium, one sport. I know they have a bit of basketball and volleyball, but fundamentally it's mostly football. Yeah, we are lucky, we have a club that have a team in Dallas, a team in Los Angeles, one team in Berlin and four teams in Europe. So we are not locked to a region, we are not locked to a city, we're not even locked to a game, because all fans are already used for us to be active in very different types of genres and things like that. So it's up to us to have a good conversation with right-holders that are seeing the potential of having a team that have only 25-year-old fans instead of 55 and wants them to pay attention and be part of it and get involved into their sports.
Speaker 1:Okay In terms of those teams Like, it's obviously very competitive because when you've got everybody who's playing the game, that thinks OK, so I really like playing this game. You're right, there's only a small percentage that would feel as though they could play at that high level. But how important is that talent identification for you in terms of keeping the teams fresh and making sure that you've got the best talent, the teams fresh and making sure that you've got the best talent? It's obviously working to win 12 out of 16 league of legends titles. That shows that you're not standing on. You know on on on the uh. You know on on history. You're, you're moving forward all the time yeah, I mean, it's everything you know.
Speaker 2:Like a team is like a combination of like extraordinary talents that are becoming a team and optimize and keep developing their talent always on. So we have as many coaching staff as players in G2. That means like we are very obsessed with like helping extraordinary talent to become the best version of themselves. We're obsessed with the idea of the collective is more important than the individual. So if a player start to behave in a way that is toxic for the idea of the collective is more important than the individual. So if a player starts to behave in a way that is toxic for the rest of the team, we'll never put talent over the collective and we'll find another player that is ready to work for the team.
Speaker 2:So it's a combination of hard skills and soft skills that we try to optimize, with the same amount of passion for preparation and supporting staff Probably different balance.
Speaker 2:For us, stamina and sprint are less important than knowledge of the game and team coordination and communication. But we also still believe that being healthy in terms of nutrition, sleep habits, having some good understanding of value of like meditation and breathing technique are key to the one percent that will make a difference in the final after six hours on stage in the best competition of the world. So we are, yeah, talent, of course, scouting all the time. We try to secure the best talents in every game. We try to combine them in a smart way. We try to get the best coaching staff. Recently, in a game called Counter-Strike, we sold one of the best players in the world and, instead of trying to replace him with another star player, we actually invested a big amount of the money we collected into acquiring the best coach in the world. So that's a good illustration of what we believe. The brain is as important as the ends in the success of an esports team.
Speaker 1:Yeah, fast twitch Neural synapses just as much as fast twitch fingers, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean like, as you know, probably not. We are privileged to be one of the only team in the world sponsored by red bull at the global level and as such, we are invited to use their athletic center in salzburg. So we go there and we do boot camps, we do off-season preparation with them and and they test us like the tests mechanically, what all players can do in terms of eye and coordination. You know this light movement test and it's funny because we have access to the data from other sports, so we see that all players are faster than formula one drivers, superjet pilots and other athletes that are just mostly judged on their mechanical analytical qualities. But all players are faster on the very unique ability that they have to identify a pixel difference and react very fast to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a fascinating world and it does bring together so many different areas that are so important for a young person's development of character, of skill, of sense of self-worth and everything else.
Speaker 2:For me there's two potential risks. Thinking that esports is so different that there's nothing to learn from sports yeah, that's, it's a mistake, because we at g2 in particular take it very seriously to learn from performance, coach and other method of training how to apply this to esports, and we try to adapt. But the other mistake is to think that just applying what two sports do will fit 100% to esports. So we try always to think what is the best mix. Sports do will fit 100% to esports, so we try always to think what is the best mix between the two. We have players that train too hard in the gym and then have some difficulties to perform, and then we have players that eat in a way that is not adequate to high performance and then they get tired and they don't high performance stage. So we try to get the best of both worlds and to learn how to optimize performance for every single players at a time.
Speaker 1:Is there still a significant advantage to youth, though, that you've got you know the people who are coming into it fresh. Have you noticed that the dynamic, the demographic profile of your star players has changed over the course of the last 10 years?
Speaker 2:I think the pioneers of esports professional esports were overtraining their players, which was significantly impacting the duration of their career. We learned to adapt our training schedule to be more qualitative and quantitative, which enable us to significantly extend the duration of the career of our top players. Having said that, it's very rare to have a players that is older than 30 years old okay so it's. It's relatively old for esports, but it's still relatively young if you think about traditional sports.
Speaker 1:True Traditional sports, new sports, everything that relates to it. In that sense as well, it is important when you get beyond 30, you realize the fallacy of your career being over at that stage of your life. But that's life, that's the way that nature goes in terms of where you see, is there a ceiling for what you can achieve with g2 or is there? Is there an ambitious roadmap that you've actually got set out? You're 10 years old this year. Where do you see yourselves as being in 10 years time as part of an obviously expanded universe for for the whole gaming environment?
Speaker 2:I think for us there's a there's a clear path forward to to uh, extend the, the, the territorial connection of g2. We are very strong in europe, us and in china. That means what about India, what about Brazil, what about Middle East? And there's no barrier two and three for us to be as relevant in these regions than we are right now in Europe and US. So that would be the obvious next step.
Speaker 2:The second one is a bit more complicated, but we tested very successfully this year with football. It's like to extend the kind of discipline where we get involved and we are bullish that. You know, it would be quite refreshing for a rugby club, a cricket club or a football club to be called G2. And I think the fans will have a lot of fun with us and it will change any league where we participate if we are part of this, a little bit like the way Ryan Reynolds and Rexham changed football. You know, we believe that this mentality could apply very well to the G2 brand and the way we treat athletes in our marketing will be very entertaining.
Speaker 2:And then, finally, I would say that the final form of G2 is probably going to be beyond competition. We have a lot of fun with storytelling, so we believe that we could create, like the next Ted Lessel, we could create the next, you know, inspired by competition stories, and not just for YouTube or social media, but potentially on Netflix and Amazon Prime. So that's an angle that is very unique to G2. We create 85% of our content as a scripted content, which is very unique. Most of the clubs are doing a capturing reality, but are not writing it. We do, and so we think that there's an angle for that as well, as today we are very focused on competition, but gaming is much bigger than esports, so why don't we play a bigger role in the gaming world by helping studio promote their games or brands, connecting with gamers, not just in competition. So so that's kind of like, as you can see, a lot of like areas where we see yourself expanding, top priority, winning and entertaining. Entertaining, that's still us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, are you as excited now today as you were when you came into it in the first place?
Speaker 2:I think I'm more excited now Because when I joined I said I think one day G2 could even have a football club. And I was like nah, that's just the sentence you say, but we did it. So what is next for us? You know?
Speaker 1:It sounds incredibly exciting and the very best of luck to you in terms of what it's going to achieve. Just one final question. Is there an area of the world Saudi Arabia has been very much to the fore now in terms of reaching out and staging mega events in Riyadh and in Jeddah as well. Is there a sense that the global scale of esports is going to be driven by one particular country or one particular region, in the sense that they might like to do that, or is it by its very nature so diversified that that's not going to happen.
Speaker 2:I would start with gaming. Studios are everywhere in the world. We have Japanese studios, we have Chinese studios, we have American studios, we have European studios, we have american studio, we have european studio with ubisoft. I think it makes sense in a world where 70 of a population of a country like saudi arabia are under 25 and avid gamers, that one day will have studio there too, you know. And so that's that's fundamentals like this is right now the fastest growing region of the world in terms of new players, so, of course, everybody's getting excited to have the games in the hands of these new players, and similarly for us, we want to have new fans, and this is a place where there's a lot of new fans potential for us.
Speaker 2:Now, with regards to the competitive side, yeah, I mean, I want my players and my teams to play in the biggest tournament in the world. So right now it's eSports World Cup. This is the biggest eSports event ever created. Normally, we go to China for a few days and we play one game in one tournament. This is like 23 games for eight weeks. Nobody has ever created something like that, and so, and of course, they treat the players very well and the stage are beautiful. The fans love it. So I mean, we are very happy to participate because that's what we do. We want our team to play on the biggest stage in front of the biggest amount of fans, and I mean this is one of them. You know, I don't think it's going to replace everything. I think it's more additive. I have a final thing.
Speaker 1:I want to share.
Speaker 2:So I've been lucky to be part of an advisory group for the IOC around the future of gaming and esports, and the outcome is like this announcement that they did on creating the Olympic esports game, which I'm very proud and can't wait to see.
Speaker 2:What it tells me is, for me, these worlds are colliding soon, like now. Today, you have two things you have like e-sports, which is a competition of games that have nothing to do with sports, and you have like sports simulation, which are basically people playing sports through console. But the funny thing is like it's evolving right now because you have, like now, virtual cycling, you have virtual rowing, and so more and more sports understand the value of being able to practice at home in the condition of real sports. And so these three worlds, for me, are colliding, and I see that you know we are very close to a moment where we're going to be in a paddle equivalent of a field with augmented reality, goggles playing against someone that is not there but that virtually we can play together even without being together. And that moment, I think, where technology, gaming, sports will collide, I'm very excited about, and I think G2, but also the world of esports, will be well prepared to be part of.
Speaker 1:I think so. In fact, I have no doubt that that will be the case. A real pleasure talking to you and, as I say, getting that level of insight into an area which is different and yet so very similar to what we know of as the traditional business of sport. Alban Deshalot, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for taking the time to be with us on Sport for Business today.
Speaker 2:Likewise, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Thanks for being with us and thanks to Alban Deshelot for taking the time out from what is a pretty busy schedule to have a chat with us about the world of gaming and esports.
Speaker 1:It is a sector of the market which many people have yet to really recognize as being as big as it is, but listening to his thoughts, his views on where it's going, it is undoubtedly going to be one of the largest areas within the business of sport over the coming years and decades. Just because something is new doesn't mean that it isn't as big as it is. We're going to be talking to others in the sector, including Sinead Hosey from Phoenix Gaming, who are our partners in our gaming and esports coverage, and with Alison Gormley from Riot Games as well, who've got a fabulous setup in Swords in North County Dublin as part of their global broadcast operation for bringing the very best of esports to the world. If you're interested in what you've heard today and interested in the broader commercial world of sport in Ireland and further afield, you can find out more about what we do every day at wwwsportforbusinesscom and we will be back again next week with the latest in this series of interviews on esports and gaming. Thanks very much for your time, thank you.
