Overwatch League Nationality Data Part 2

Home Players

Which Overwatch League team has the most home players?

To work out which team best represents the country they are (nominally at least until next year) based in, I’ve taken the number of players in each team from their home country, expressed as a percentage of the whole roster.

Here are the results of that.

As you can see there is currently one team in Overwatch league with a fully homegrown roster, which is unsurprisingly the fully Korean Seoul Dynasty.

Chengdu gets very close, However Baconjack, one of their DPS players is Taiwanese, Which despite what the Chinese government might think is not a part of the People’s Republic of China, where the rest of his squad mates are from.

There are 6 teams not included on the chart, because these are the 6 teams with 0 home players. They are:

• Florida Mayhem
• London Spitfire
• Los Angeles Gladiators
• New York Excelsior
• Toronto Defiant
• Vancouver Titans

Of these teams 4 (Mayhem, Spitfire, Excelsior, Titans) are non Korean teams fielding wholly Korean rosters.

Overall there are two factors which characterise this data, The high representation of Korean players, and the much higher number of US based teams with largely non US rosters.

Do any OWL teams pass the test?

Other sports have home-grown player requirements. A limit on the number of players not from that country that a team can play. These are designed to encourage teams to develop local talent, and to help the teams better represent their areas. With a greater focus on local matches in 2020, I wanted to see whether a similar rule could work for OWL.

As a comparison I’m using the UK Premier League rules and applying them to the Overwatch League. It doesn’t directly apply due to the different roster sizes but it boils down to approximately 32% home-grown players. let’s take another look at our data to see how many league teams make the cut.

Every team above the red line passes the test, and every team below (plus of course the 6 not listed with 0 home players) fails.

It’s clear from this that adding home player requirements right now would be a massive change for the League that would leave a majority of teams needing huge roster changes.

Given the international nature of the world of esports (a polite way of saying the dominance of Korean players) I believe a smaller threshold might be more effective.

There are a lot of teams between 10 and 20% that could with some minor roster changes hit a more reasonable 20% home player requirement. I foresee another benefit to this too.

There are 6 players per team that are playing at any time. if 20%, i.e. 1 in 5, of a teams roster is home based, then all other things being equal there should be at least one home based player playing at any time.

But wait, there’s more

I’m not entirely happy with the approach we’ve taken with our data this time. Check out my next post for a new way of looking at the data which should give us a clearer picture of which teams best represent their areas…