Team Liquid is one of the highest-earning eSports organizations in the world. With the recent controlling interest sale to new ownership group aXiomatic last September — led by sports team owners Peter Guber, Ted Leonsis and Magic Johnson — the team has generated a heightened level of buzz over the past four months.
In January 2015, Team Liquid merged with Curse Gaming and then-CEO Steve Arhancet, eventually all operating under the Team Liquid brand name. Today, Arhancet and Victor Goossens operate as Co-CEOs of the organization and manage teams across fives games, including League of Legends, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2, in addition to single players for titles such as Super Smash Bros. and Street Fighter.
Goossens, who founded Team Liquid over 15 years ago originally as a StarCraft news site, balanced his coverage of the eSports title while being a full-time poker player, even moving to South Korea for six months to compete.
With 2017 just kicking off and ownership investment, Goossens recently spoke with SportTechie to discuss aXiomatic, relationships with sponsors such as Monster Energy and HTC, how surprised he is about the amount of money being bet on eSports, and where Team Liquid is heading over the next 12 months.
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On what the relationship is like between Team Liquid and Ted Leonsis, CEO and owner of Monumental Sports and Entertainment … It’s more strategic than anything. We recently flew to Washington to get to know Ted’s team and Ted’s staff (2o-person Monumental team) to educate them on what Team Liquid does. They have a ton of different skill sets, whether it’s experience with ticket sales or sponsorships or venues. There are so many skilled people behind us now, but they don’t maybe necessarily know how their skill set can help us. So, we went there to share what we do, how everything works and see how we can make the best use of each other. The most obvious connection is help with sponsorships.
On the approach with taking the Team Liquid name to market when having conversations with sponsors … Our approach is pretty similar to before. Try and communicate all of the different ways you can market in eSports and why they’re unique — maybe there’s a more direct line to the audience or the audience you’re reaching is generally hard to reach versus traditional marketing. You can sit down with a non-endemic brand that’s really giving the time to just listen to you. Our approach is no different, it’s really them taking us much more seriously now.
On the impact of traditional sports players (owners and athletes) investing money in eSports … I think it really helps legitimize what we do. I think there’s a process of education. I think there’s a lot of things in eSports that is undervalued from both media rights and sponsorships. Having those guys involved, in my opinion, really accelerates that process of getting that to more traditional values, which is really beneficial to us. It also helps bring attention to a larger audience that maybe wouldn’t have known about eSports before.
On how shocking it is at the amount of money being invested in eSports and at the heightened rate we have all seen over the past 18 months … Yeah, it is a little bit and has gone super, super fast. Valuations have skyrocketed. I’d say two or three years ago, while we definitely expected that growth, we never expected this. There’s definitely been some surprises to it. I’ve been doing this forever and really believe in what we do. I think it’s incredibly entertaining. Certainly everyone can have their own definition of sport, but I consider this a sport just like any other. These guys are performing at an incredibly high level, practices are brutal and I’ve always liked eSports or the games within eSports. From that perspective, it’s not too surprising it’s starting to reach a larger audience, especially when you see how much more accustomed to gaming kids and young adults are these days.
On how sponsorship deals are structured with Team Liquid … Our partners are across all of the games, and we sell them as a combined package for now. I wouldn’t rule out a partner coming in and wanting to focus on one or two games. Currently, we’re just selling everything as a total package across all teams. … Typically they’re anywhere from one and three-year deal but the majority are one-year deals still.
On the relationship with Monster Energy, which is one of the more non-endemic brands aligned with Team Liquid … They’re absolutely a mainstream brand but a lot of their marketing strategy is based on eSports. Little endemic, non-endemic. They’ve been in eSports for a long time actually. They were in eSports about four years ago. They’ve always known about Team Liquid. … I’d say the deal with HTC is more non-endemic than Monster. … We originally did that deal around phones but virtual reality was baked into the deal. It’ll be cool to see what we can do there as well.