This is Part Two of a multi-part series about the infrastructure of esports leagues. Part One focused on the differences between the franchise model chosen by Blizzard and Riot and the hands-off approach used by Valve. This part concerns the minor league ecosystem and both the League Championship Series and Overwatch League’s “Path to Pro” initiatives.
One of the toughest challenges for decision makers in traditional sports is discovering and developing players. While the games might be different, the same is true in esports. Major League Baseball has a massive farm system, spanning more than four levels from Rookie Ball to AAA and comprising 248 teams in comparison to the MLB’s 30. The NBA and the NFL instead rely on collegiate sports to groom talent. There are 252 Division I football schools and 351 basketball schools feeding into 32 and 30 pro teams, respectively.
League of Legends (LoL) and Overwatch, two of the biggest esports in the world, have found success through modeling themselves on traditional pro sports, right down to attempts to create developmental systems. But even in the most established esports, defining a clear path to the pros is still a work in progress.
In 2017, Riot Games, the developer and owner of League of Legends, created a program called Scouting Grounds to identify new talent for its League Championship Series (LCS). The program invites top players from the amateur online-play community to compete in front of LCS staff. In between Scouting Grounds and the LCS is the Academy, where every LCS team has an Academy-based counterpart. The relationship operates like AAA baseball, with players being called up and down throughout the season. Last year Riot held a draft to select 10 players from Scouting Grounds who would be given a shot in the LCS Academy.
Scouting Grounds largely replaced Riot’s previous mantra of “four buddies and a dream,” explains North American LCS commissioner Chris Greeley. That prior idea relied on the hope that groups of friends playing from their couches and who kept winning early in the year would end up in high-level competitions come November. As LoL grew in popularity, the dream fizzled.
“As sponsors and money came in, that concept began to die,” Greeley explained. “You could no longer compete at the amateur level because this was a real market to build an amateur team into a semi-pro team into a pro team. Challenger [now called the Academy] level teams were going out importing talent from Europe and Asia. We wound up with payrolls at the [Academy] level that were higher than the LCS because the payoff of getting a team up was so high.”
That payoff has a number tied to it: $2.5 million. That is the amount that Milwaukee Bucks co-owner Wesley Edens paid to buy out Cloud 9’s Challenger team when it was promoted to the LCS in 2016. Edens’s team was renamed “FlyQuest.”
With Scouting Grounds, “we created a system where players with a high level of mechanical skill can learn the other soft skills they need to succeed in any team sport,” Greeley said. Teams want to know if prospects also have intangible metrics like coachability or communication on top of raw individual skill. “We take the top 20 players from solo queue, fly them out and have them meet with coaches and analysts. Then they get put on four different teams and LCS staff is there to watch the games, hear communication and interview players. It’s a lot like the NFL combine.”
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In the Overwatch League, through Open tournaments a prospective pro and his or her amateur team could work their way up into the Contenders division but only the player, and not the team, can make that last leap to the Overwatch League (OWL). Minor league teams can move up or down, but only within the minor leagues.
“The life of a competitive player in our eyes is: someone picks up the game, begins playing the built-in competitive mode, then, if they want to take it more seriously they can enter the Open division,” explains Dan McHugh, Product Manager for Overwatch Esports. “From that tournament they go to a promotion/relegation tournament where they play the bottom teams in the Contenders.”
Right now, nine of 12 teams in the OWL have corresponding Academy teams in the Contenders division. Like other teams in the Contenders, those Academy teams tied to the OWL can be relegated down to the Open division but with the financial support of their major league affiliates, that doesn’t seem likely.
“Overwatch Academy teams have not yet faced relegation,” McHugh says. “We want to ensure that the development space for the Overwatch League teams is protected.”
OWL team owners each paid at least $20 million for their franchises, so investors like Stan Kroenke, Jeff Wilpon, and Robert Kraft want some stability to come with that price tag.
“[Game developers] want to follow a traditional American sports structure. They don’t want people to be relegated, that’s bad for investors,” says Rod Breslau a former ESPN writer and current esports consultant.
With old sports money behind esports teams, the fact that player development systems are beginning to resemble a traditional American sports model comes as no surprise. Drawing inspiration from the NFL, the LCS’s Scouting Grounds replicates a combine and draft format. And while the OWL minor league promotion/relegation system might bring up comparisons to international soccer, its new Academy system is really closer to baseball’s farm system than the hierarchy of divisions that sit below the English Premier League or La Liga.