The fisherman and Esports

What members and organizations really gain by joining an Esports governing body.

These are the questions most often asked when we talk about building an ecosystem based on the institutional side, and more specifically, in my case, of electronic sports: "What do I get out of this?" and "What are the benefits for me and my organization?"

By "benefits", most of the time read "financial help". By "organization", read "association or federation", or any type of body in this legal, economic and administrative category.

First, I must explain that this article is aimed at the institutional Esports ecosystem. I will remind the reader of this several times throughout the article.

What is hard to make people understand, for those who start the dialogue with this kind of question, is first that you must understand the real and practical meaning of the word "sustainable"; second, that you must first learn "to fish"; and third, that you must ask yourself this question: what have you already done for your community, your region, your Esports ecosystem, through the work you carry out, or should have carried out by now? Have you held a few Esports events, and is that your answer? Then you are very far from having built an institutional ecosystem for electronic sports in your region. That may be one of the reasons you ask: "what benefit will I get from joining a continental, regional or international electronic sports body?" In truth, you have barely started the road to creating that sports ecosystem in your region. Be ready, because the walk will be long, hard, painful and certainly taken in short steps. Be sure that after reading this article you will understand what benefits you will have by joining a continental, regional and/or international electronic sports body, at least if you belong to the right body. By "right" I mean one that does, acts, creates opportunities, unites sides, adds value, fosters and creates fostering and opportunities freely, and offers the steps and the practical guide needed for your long journey. Weigh everything, including how long the body you already belong to has existed (if you already belong to one). The older it is, and the less of what you read in this article you have received from it, the worse it is, the less of an institutional and correct example it will be, and the less it has actually done for you, your region and the whole Esports ecosystem. And again, if for some reason you already belong to a body but have never heard (or read, in this case) anything of what is presented here coming directly from that body, and it has done nothing of the kind for you and your organization, wake up! If you have NOTHING, you are doing nothing, for nothing, and you will certainly have NOTHING as the final result! It is time to rethink your membership or continuity in that body. You have only to gain, or at least you will start to gain something from all this and from leaving a body that told you or offered you no guide on what we will cover here. And who knows, you may never again ask "what do I get out of it", because you will learn by yourself to create an environment in which that "question" answers itself, as a consequence of work well done on your part.

But as I said, it is hard for these people to understand the meaning of "sustainable". It is not enough to want some kind of sponsorship, investment or financial support for your initiative if the main question, as I said before, is not answered frankly, directly and honestly to yourself: what have you really done for your Esports ecosystem?

In most cases, as I described in an earlier article called "Why sponsor Esports? The end of the Gamer era", an investment in the sense of sponsorship comes more directly to an Esports event, and not to the institutional body or even the team itself. Here I mean the real sense of the word "sponsorship", not only the crumbs often offered to the parties involved, such as "donations" of keyboards, monitors, chairs and so on. This is all duly justified by an environment that the people involved in Esports created themselves, in a way that devalued themselves, through their lack of business maturity and a low valuation of the practice, which until then also had no parameters or metrics of market valuation, and which was corrupted and badly managed in an environment where the sponsor sees this kind of "alms-sponsorship" as something "normal" to be accepted by whoever asks for it. I am not generalizing this criticism of this type of "sponsorship". In particular cases it is a fact that chairs, keyboards, monitors and other supplies are more than welcome and often even a miracle to have obtained. There are different markets and situations. As an example I can give what we had for WESCO in China in November 2018, when we held the WESCO International University Championship. We had sponsorship from Coca-Cola, DELL Alienware and UNIGAMER HARDWARE. The latter, a maker of Esports chairs, offered us fantastic models, two models in fact, in dozens of units, fully standardized with the colors, logos and other aspects we needed at WESCO.

Returning to the logic of the argument, sponsorship always comes directly to the event, not to the maintenance of the operational, human and administrative needs of the people in the organization (body) seeking that investment for itself.

Besides the negative factor in sponsorship that the sector itself created, but which is now being reversed in large events (and only in events), the biggest factor stopping the ideal investment from happening is the lack of operational and administrative structure and, above all, the lack of a safe environment for that investment to be made. When we speak of a safe "environment" here, we mean specifically the lack of basic public, private and operational policies that the body clearly does not provide to its Esports ecosystem. Potential investors will always want an economically and legally safe environment.

First, since this article is about the institutional side, we must understand that the foundations of the institutional Esports ecosystem have to be built. That means creating rules and bylaws for these bodies, and departments such as anti-doping, health and high performance, athletes' commissions, a referee commission, an ethics commission, a fiscal council, a model of good governance and financial and accounting transparency, a board and a presidency, among many other phases, areas and ways of managing the body itself and the ecosystem that will define institutional Esports in your region. This includes even a superior sports justice court and a dispute resolution chamber, both dedicated to electronic sport.

And for all this to be possible in the near future in your region, remember that you need to work with government bodies at their various levels (federal, state or district, and municipal), and with their politicians, such as senators, federal deputies and state deputies. The first aim is laws that recognize electronic sport as a regular sports category nationally (and then, as I said, at state and municipal level). The next is regulation of that law, starting a phase of legal, labor and sporting security for practitioners, for teams and clubs and, finally, for investors (sponsors). Once electronic sport is recognized as a regular sports category in your region, you can even propose new tax incentive and investment laws, or have electronic sport included as a beneficiary of existing Incentive Laws. Other laws could benefit practitioners duly registered with your organization through discounts on the supplies needed to practice this sport, such as chairs, computers, video game consoles, keyboards, monitors and so on. There is also educational incentive, which can be created, such as scholarships from schools and universities.

All this, remembering once more, is about institutional electronic sport and not the private kind (the latter is free to explore electronic sport as it wishes, and certainly always following common sense in the various areas involved).

But for all this to happen you need to know what to do, when to do it and, above all, how to make it all happen, make it real and make it work!

That is why you need to learn how to fish, and not just sit at the table and eat the fish already prepared. You have to learn to fish, clean the fish, season it and also know how to eat it, as we say here in Brazil (certainly every country has its own version in its local language).

With the creation of WESCO, the World Esports Consortium, and also PAMESCO (the Pan-American Confederation of Esports), the wish was exactly this: to create the whole operational, administrative, legislative and regulatory ecosystem for INSTITUTIONAL electronic sport. It took years, in fact 5 years so far, to create this ecosystem and all its documentary and Legal structure.

We did this so we could offer, in a real and truly practical way, the step-by-step guide so that the bodies that came to us and wanted to join could have everything we have already created, understood and now put into practice. That is why we put first the importance of "teaching how to fish", and NEVER giving "the fish ready to be eaten"!

So the question "what do I or my organization gain from this?" or "what benefits will I have?" must above all be asked of yourself. What we have within WESCO, PAMESCO and even CBDEL (the Brazilian Confederation of Electronic Sports, from which I draw the practical experience I often pass on to PAMESCO, WESCO and even members of these bodies, as I did for dear friends in PERU, MEXICO, GHANA and JAMAICA, to name just a few we work with directly, and still do for many other bodies in many other countries, with care and dedication and completely FREE of charge) is exactly this: a safe, sustainable and responsible institutional environment in which the WHOLE base of a sports category is being built. And we demand this of every member of PAMESCO and WESCO. Of course we use the word "demand" here in the sense that we are offering the know-how for them to create this complete institutional electronic sports ecosystem in their region, and so we want to see practical results applied and obtained by each member.

All this keeping in mind that the intention of creating an institutional electronic sports body must be real and must, in most cases, include the various areas described above related to the sports base being created, and not only the Esports event, that is, holding competition after competition. Otherwise you are certainly on the wrong road, the institutional one. As an institutional body you are NOT an electronic sports events company. More than that, you are responsible for keeping electronic sports events (institutional ones, not private) under your guardianship with the proper social responsibility as well as sporting responsibility. Competition events will be a consequence of the activities you carry out before the event itself. An event must have a purpose beyond just entertaining and handing out prizes to athletes and teams. You will create an environment in which the athlete and the Esports team or club are valued throughout their career. Here we use the word "career" in a fully concrete, possible and necessary sense, as in any other regular sport (such as basketball or football). That includes the Legal aspects of benefits for a professional athlete, in the real sense of the word "professional": legally recognized as an athlete, affiliated with your organization, and not merely using the word "professional" for someone with extremely unique, perfect and highly competent skills. You must create commercial and disciplinary rules to sustain the careers of these athletes and their clubs (and/or teams), such as transfer rules, competition rules and athlete substitution windows, and, as we said, arbitration and disciplinary rules. These are just a very few rules within a broad system of general and specific regulations, and only if we speak of the Sports Law side and the commercial side. There is still the athlete's own side, ethics, and many others. Education must be considered first, with the inclusion of electronic sport in teaching and learning options in public and private schools, and the educational rules and policies for this inclusion must be created first, in the same way as the aspects of social inclusion and electronic sports and many others. There is also the educational side of electronic sport itself, in which disciplines such as coach, referee, athlete, trainer, operator, commentator, caster, programmer and others must be created. This is the institutional side, where a complete ecosystem of a sports category is created from its base.

So the answer to the question that is always asked, and that we presented at the start of this article, is that these are the initial benefits of belonging to bodies like ours, set out above. We will show you how to fish. We will give full documentary support, and even financial support when possible, with examples that guide and help in forming your institutional Esports ecosystem, whether operational, administrative, legislative or regulatory. That includes contacting your government, the sports bodies of your country, rulers and legislators, and any other needs that arise and that we already know exist. We assure our members that everything within our reach will be done so that they succeed and so that the economic and social benefits are reached by them, their body and the Esports ecosystem of their region.

Remember that institutional sport has three strands that must be OPERATED separately but ADMINISTERED together: Development (entertainment), EDUCATIONAL (school and university) and PROFESSIONAL (high performance). Besides these three there is also the OLYMPIC MOVEMENT, which must be taken into account. We will deal with that subject in another article.

Above all you must understand that institutional electronic sport, like any other sport seen from the institutional perspective and operated and administered at the institutional level (such as basketball, volleyball or football), has the final aim of FORMING THE CITIZEN. Have you never heard that sport should form the citizen? Do you not see this happening in the organizations of other sports that have been recognized as regular for years? This is truly a sad reality that we face and live every day. We forget, we distort ourselves and we stray from the straight and direct final path of education, culture, politics and sport: FORMING THE CITIZEN. After all, forming the citizen means giving ourselves access to dignified public policies for all, healthy and ethical sports events, quality education, and with them a career and financial benefits that are guaranteed and fully compatible with a healthy environment where the CITIZEN is indeed the greatest and only beneficiary of all this, whether employee or employer. But we know this is not true, or at least not practiced. A sad truth. Nothing stops us from trying to change this path and return to the correct one, right?

Governance transparency and financial transparency in these bodies and organizations must above all be taken into account. A piece of advice? Do not accept, in any way, taking part in bodies that have damaged ethics, good governance and transparency in their actions and management. Free the world from corruption, money laundering, abuse of power and so many other evils brought to us, as humanity, for so long, which make us regress or stay stagnant in time and not progress as CITIZENS. Let us be examples of what is right, clean and constructive. After all, we are a new sports category, with new concepts, breaking paradigms and bringing light and new possibilities and means of solving old questions and difficulties, not only with technology but with new forms of sustainability and social and commercial responsibility. Let us be what we say we are, something new and better!

Above all have self-respect for yourself, your work and your organization, because this example and self-respect will guide what investors offer you and the return you get from your affiliates. Do not sell yourself cheap and destroy an environment that could be correct and solid in every area. Do not sell yourself in any way! That is why WESCO and PAMESCO will rarely give their members various offers, such as member offers of "free plane tickets" to the events we hold, except on rare, specific and justified occasions. At most we offer lodging and meals, because we do not want our members to see these acts as bargaining chips, favors, and ways of obtaining loyalty and other favors disguised as "benefits", so that those same members can then say in their regions that they are the reference in electronic sports management because, through them, a few athletes each year can go to a certain Esports event with paid plane tickets. That is a vicious circle of "buying favors" where nobody learns to be sustainable, much less carries out real and practical actions to build the institutional electronic sports ecosystem in their own regions. It only brings more negative image to those same organizations, which are seen as inefficient, ineffective and unnecessary because they do nothing and only boast about something offered once a year, very occasionally. I am not criminalizing the bodies that do this. Each one judges their own actions, and they know what they do and the reasons that lead them to do it this way.

And remember, as I said before, your body is not an Esports events company. What would be the logic of providing and holding Esports events, doing exactly what already exists in the market without the institutional character, if you set out to be an institutional Esports body? None, except wasting your time! For an institutional Esports event to go well, or badly, there are many steps, but they can be taken. Remember that you will be building a sports category from its roots.

Whether we need to have this, or simply keep going with what we already have? It depends on who asks and on who answers. The private side is wonderful, must always exist, and I hope it always grows bigger and better! I myself have several companies in different areas of electronic sport, and I love freedom of market and trade, and the private sector. The private sector and its electronic sports events move the companies that create and develop not only the franchises but also the platforms and the whole ecosystem we have for the category.

Everything must be free, and athletes are our main reason for EVERYTHING. They win with both sides and must be FREE to move between the two sides, the private and the institutional. The institutional can and must exist, since we are dealing here with Electronic Sports, and not only Electronic Games. But that subject, like the Olympic Movement as I said before, is for another article!