eSports has been around for about 15 years now. For about 10 of those years we’ve had “major leagues” and “Olympic of eSports” but we’ve done nothing to deserve those things. Why? because we’re imitating the real world sports - and doing it poorly.
You see the things people at MLG(them especially because they took the first two words of the MOST BELOVED SPORT IN THE THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA), IEM, WCG, and ESWC don’t do when imitating the sports is do research. You know why these major leagues formed - MLB, NHL, NBA and the like - formed was because the teams which were already around decided to make their own league instead of having some sort of ridiculous independent system which ranks teams on some sort of formula or polls(See NCAA). It also made it much easier to schedule and make rankings that could be considered official.
They also were made to fuck over the players and try to keep the salaries and costs low. But that’s another topic entirely.
So basically the pro teams existed long before the league. MLB, NHL, NFL, NBA all had professional teams which made up their league - not the league which made the teams. Or the leagues that gave the teams validity(ie places to compete with the best). The teams were already competing with other teams - and the best ones floated to the top, got managers and formed their own league.
I’m not sure about all of soccer(futbol for your damned euro’s) but i know that the EPL was formed only 20 years ago - from the teams which were the best in England and had nowhere to play.
I think more then anything the teams need to actually work together - and then form their own rankings and actually hold each other accountable and enforce their damn contracts. And the leagues are doing it totally backwards: they've got the "major league" feel without doing what was done in order to do what traditional sports did to get there.
And none of the teams invest into development - which means that we're hoping that we get lucky when somebody gets called up into the majors or we have to pay/buyout another organization to get the talent need to get better results. The only one i can think of is a call back to 2004 when complexity sponsored forsaken - a team which once held coL’s place as America's second team. It’s also ironic that they are the only team which has ever even tried to hold “academies” or sponsorship tournaments.
This will serve 2 purposes: you’ll be able to ACTUALLY HAVE PEOPLE THERE TO CALL UP WHEN SOMEBODY RETIRES. And unlike starcraft - which no matter how close knit a team is it’s still an individual game - having a player retire/be traded/get bought out in a game like counter-strike, TF2, Halo or the like really can hinder team performance, especially if your in a country like America where talent is few and far between for CS and is equally hard to hold onto. The second reason why this is important is it gives you leverage against both the current players(who could be replaced easily by the up and comers) and against your rivals for those players(as you have both young talent and you can sell them such talent for a profit by the sales of such talents).
And instead of getting TV/radio/streaming rights for their matches(read, revenue) they're doing it all out of pocket meaning that most of the stress is on them. Especially when organizations are finally becoming big enough to to demand such things and streamers are getting the revenue needed to actually purchase such rights. But this’ll be talked about much later down the road.
TL;DR - nobody's doing anything right, and nobody bothered to open up a damn book and do some research.
