In the not too distant past the Saudi arm of esports announced the creation of the Esports Nations Cup, as a sort of extension of the already existing Esports World Cup. The idea isn’t precisely a new one, but it appears to be gaining interest again at this precise moment. So the question is, why now and can this project work?
It might be worth taking a look at the existing power struggle that has been going on for a while to try and build what we could charitably call national esports infrastructure. Most countries have an existing sports infrastructure that offers opportunities, grants, jobs and which lobbies for sports both at an amateur and elite level. Rational then to build a similar structure for esports. The two most well known attempts to do this have been the IESF, International Esports Federation and the Global Esports Federation or GEF. These two federations have for many years been in a strange power struggle to gain legitimacy from the traditional sports space and politically. It seems obvious from the outside that the end goal is to gain Olympic recognition and be the first to host some kind of large esports olympic push. There are plenty of strange barriers that seem evident even at the outset here.
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Esports in the year 2026 is largely still in control of the developers of the games that we’re all playing. That makes it hard almost by definition to build a lot of structure because at the whim of some game development company whole games could potentially go offline or crash in popularity. I don’t think that means it isn’t worth the effort of building the infrastructure, but it probably means the structure has to be game independent.
But that plan has its own problems, because as you can imagine, without strong developer support, many of the biggest esports titles are hard to get proper recognition for. A way to imagine how this might play out is to imagine how tricky it would be to host a nations based tournament in the current CS landscape, that actually features any of the top players we recognize from the top of CS. The top teams already are unable to attend all the tier 1 tournaments, which means making time for a nations cup, is just incredibly unlikely. This does open up an interesting question though, do we need the top players for the idea of function? I’m not sure that has to be the case.
As luck would have it, I have actually worked at some of the IESF events in the past, so I have some insight into how parts of this work. Fundamentally each country, when it comes to IESF, has its own IESF representation that is responsible for fielding teams in the various esports categories whenever a tournament is happening. For some countries that already have a lot of esports events, it might not seem like a big deal. But for others the IESF or GEF structures are pretty much the only game in town. The last IESF event I was at was in Morocco. It happened to also be the first time I’ve personally done an event on the African continent, which was pretty cool all on its own. The teams attending the Counter-Strike portion of the tournament were from all over Africa, and they had all played internal qualifiers to get to the final stage with the promise of being crowned African champions.
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I got to speak to several of the players and some of the representatives from those countries too, and I can easily say that without the IESF infrastructure in place, there would be little to no esports happening in many of the countries now playing for a title. The bad news in some sense is that not every country is always represented at these events, because some of them have opted for GEF representation instead. And herein lies another problem. Just like we wouldn’t want different companies building different roads next to each other for their own customers to drive on, we probably don’t want multiple eSports federations fighting each other. I believe at one point in the past European based IESF tournaments had no British representation, because the UK has joined with GEF. While the loss here might be somewhat minimal, it ultimately hurts everyone.
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What is interesting is that for a while the Saudis seemed interested in joining the leadership in both IESF and GEF, which appeared to pave the way for some kind of interesting future partnership. Again it’s worth remembering that all of this was ultimately meant to end up with a deal with the International Olympic Committee or IOC. Ultimately this didn’t end up happening and instead we now have the Esports Nations Cup or ENC.
In some sense this is a bit of a shame because we potentially end up with 3 different attempts to organize a similar kind of event, but it might not be all bad. From what I can tell the IOC has at least for the minute decided not to partner with anyone, which I personally don’t really care much about. I don’t really think esports needs to be in the Olympics to be taken seriously. Would it help with building out the infrastructure in countries that participate? Sure it probably would, but regardless from a Counter-Strike perspective, there is no way the IOC will allow a blood splatter shooting game to enter their realm anytime soon.
What does all of this mean then? I think the majority of CS fans dismiss any of these attempts at building nation cups simply because we know that the top players won’t be there. But I don’t think it’s impossible for a project of this kind to actually carve out a space in the calendar. Nationalism is a powerful thing for most people, and watching your country do well is something a lot of people will gather around if the story is told correctly.
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There is also the chance that the ENC has the power to persuade some of the top level teams to lend a few of their players to the project. A lot of the way the Esports World Cup has been set up with the club incentives, could theoretically be used to push teams into fielding a few higher level players. If the excitement is high enough towards the end of the tournament, I think it will persuade more players each year to give up a bit of time to the event. The real building block of the ENC I reckon will be the individual players and their stories. Something I think we almost universally in CS do badly, is using the players’ stories properly. But because the ENC will almost certainly be missing most of the top names, it’ll be a really important test of the tournament’s story telling abilities.
If we zoom out a bit, what I see is an esports landscape that is plagued with uncertainty and a concerning lack of jobs and opportunities because of the bigger ups and downs that happen every few years. Nation based esports is a rational move to try and persuade more countries to accept further investment into the infrastructure that drives this kind of thing forward. For a country to give benefits to organizations that gather up youth esports membership or to offer grants or loans to organizations looking to boost a country’s esports footprint, there has to be some bigger ecosystem to believe in.
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A lot of the people who will be making these choices will probably have a harder time understanding the current CS system of tournaments and all the madness that comes with it. What they might have an easier time understanding is someone saying the phrase “it will be like football, but with video games..” and I don’t think we should mock that idea. Ultimately the battle between ENC, IESF and GEF is a bit of a crazy one, and nobody seems to know where the IOC is ultimately headed, but my hope is that at the end there will be a single victor or a form of cooperation that stops overlap and redundancy from happening. If that happens I think it’s just a question of building the historicity and prestige of the concept a lot of people seem to believe can work, namely a nation based tournament.
