way, to see what we can do together supporting their esports ambitions. Maybe to expand into our market, or whatever.
When the PIF acquired Newcastle football club, there was some protest from the Premier League community, which said it sort of damaged the brand. What would you say to people that have concerns? Well, frankly, there haven’t been that many concerns about the acquisition of ESL and FACEIT. We were trying to be very transparent and very forthright on how we intend to operate as a games company, in accordance with the values and culture of our industry. We intend to be an excellent games company.
Of course, there will be detractors, on this issue, that issue, or some other issue. As I said earlier, the transformation in the country is astonishing. On the face of it, from a western point of view. I say ‘buy a ticket, get on a plane, talk to the people and come see for yourself ’. It’s astonishing.
ESL has worked with Blizzard, Riot, Activision and other big players in this industry in the past. How have those companies responded to the acquisition so far? Super good, actually. ESL has been able to drive longer term publisher partnerships with longer term more lucrative sponsored partnerships off the back of our investment, not because of our investment, but I think
our investment is a signal to some of those partners that maybe the esports sector is starting to solidify. So you probably know that a lot of those advertiser and sponsor relationships, even some of the publisher relationships are very short term in nature. One or two years. To me that’s an indicator of sort of a lack of faith and commitment into how viable this is longer term, and now we’re starting to see three, four, five year sponsorship deals, with much larger sums. I think people are starting to get a sense of comfort around the space in general.
During the pandemic there was a shift to a lot more people watching esports, because people couldn’t play other sports for ages. How did those relationships go forward when those sports started to come back on? I don’t recall the numbers off the top of my head,
but I think the basic numbers for this year were only affected negatively to a certain extent by the troubling situation in Ukraine with Russia.
How do you make viewership numbers get into that wider audience, where you want to be? They might not even know what Twitch is. How do you bridge that gap? With a couple of things. One is improving the overall user experience in terms of viewership, both in broadcasting and live events. If we can bring that up to an Olympics, World Cup, F1 type level, it’ll
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