The Fastest Growing Spectator Sport You’re Not Watching
In 2015 the NFL Super Bowl became the most watched American television program in history, pulling in a staggering 114.4 million viewers on average. In 2014 the average NFL game drew 19.2 million viewers on average. American Football, then, is one of the largest spectator sports in the world.
While American Football is huge, there is another sport that’s growing fantastically quickly and will soon eclipse traditional sports as the definitive spectator experience of the 21st century. That sport is competitive gaming.
Also known as eSports, competitive gaming is the fastest growing spectator sport in the world. In competitive gaming professional players take on each other in a wide variety of different games and the matches are then streamed live for the world to behold.
In 2012 eSports total viewership was at a meager 134 million viewers. By 2014 the total viewership had grown to 206 million viewers and it is estimated that by 2017 a mind blowing 335 million people will tune in to watch the best gamers in the world go head to head.
This amazing growth has partly been due to the massively popular League of Legends. In League of Legends, players assume the role of a character, called a “champion”, with unique abilities, battling with a team against other players in order to destroy the opposing teams “Nexus”. League of Legends hosted a world championship tournament for the first time in 2011. The prize money pool back then was $100,000, the winner taking home just $50,000. Since then this event has boomed into the Super Bowl equivalent of the gaming world, pulling in 32 million viewers in 2013 with the winner taking home a cool $1 million.
Now lets take a step back and look at some of the underlying forces at play here. Traditional sports have always been incredibly popular and serve, on the best days, amazing feats of athleticism and skill. Most of the intrigue in sports comes from precisely this, people doing extraordinary things, things the average viewer could never dream of achieving. The UFC is a good example of this. The average person would never step in to a cage with Georges St. Pierre or Cain Velasquez. These men are modern day professional gladiators, who spend every waking moment training to be able to rid their opponent of consciousness. Stepping in to a cage with them is something not many people would like to try for fun.
The champions and contenders in traditional sports, then, often seem almost superhuman, but not so in eSports. Professional gamers may preform superhuman feats in-game and have highly tuned reflexes, but they are normal people. There is no dissonance between the viewer and the player. Furthermore, the games being played are ones we can all play from the comfort of our homes and we can start at any age. You don’t need to start when you are 3 years old, you can start right now be it 15 or 60. This is precisely why eSports is growing so much in popularity. You can have the same experiences that you’re watching. There is nothing like it in the world.
If you have yet to watch a single eSports match or a single Twitch stream, I urge you to go and try it out. Relish every moment of what will soon be the world’s largest spectator sport and if its up to me and my team, the greatest spectator experience the world has ever seen.
(Edited: Wording describing American Football as the world’s largest spectator sport. It is not. A brain fart on my part)
Teemu Paivinen (@teempai) is one of the founders at Oddshot.tv, an instant replay and community captured highlight reel for livestreamed gaming. For more information visit oddshot.tv or follow @oddshot_tv on twitter.
