Brentford, the West London based English Football League Championship (“EFL”) club could be entering the esports space soon, a LinkedIn job posting suggests.
The post, added yesterday, for a Marketing Manager includes the following under roles and responsibilities:
- To create a pilot project exploring the opportunity of esports for a football club, evaluate and build and agreed programme of activity against objectives
There’s no suggestion that any esports experience, or even knowledge is required although the esports segment is clearly a tiny element to a much wider job role.
The esports landscape has exploded in the last year with over 175 traditional sports clubs getting involved. Recently, Founder of Code Red Esports, Paul “Redeye” Chaloner compiled a spreadsheet showing traditional sports outfits that have entered the esports space. Whilst it’s incredible to see the amount of teams now involved in the burgeoning industry, there has not been a concerted push from English teams to enter the space.
West Ham United and Manchester City both have FIFA players on their books, whilst Wolverhampton Wanderers and a couple of others have had a gentle dabble with the Celtic Esports League. Then again, there’s not many esports enthusiasts that would suggest signing former professional football player Rohan Ricketts as your “esports player” to represent you at FIFA really constitutes entering esports.
The best examples are the likes of Schalke, PSG and F.C. Copenhagen, each of whom have gone beyond FIFA and field rosters in other titles, too. Schalke retain a League of Legends team, whilst North are a talented Counter-Strike roster owned by F.C. Copenhagen. Although Paris Saint-Germain dropped out of League of Legends, they now sit in Rocket League too.
Esports Insider says: A nice League of Legends practice room on the terraces at Griffin Park? Not sure about that… It’s great to see that clubs are looking at esports across the space now. It would be completely unwise to ignore it this year. Let’s see if English clubs and team backers get as heavily involved as their North American counterparts this year.