Is There Tribalism in Esports Fandom

 By Jack Coleman  Many traditional sports are heavily influenced by tribalism. It is particularly prevalent in sports like football where most if not all fans align themselves to a particular club. This is often the local football team in the area. Though, many people also choose to support a larger club in addition to their local team. This is prevalent in Ireland where many football fans choose to follow an English Premier League club (I’m an Everton fan). However, a subsection of the football community are hardcore fans, people who mould aspects of their personality and life around their chosen club. The most fanatical niche of these fans are called ultras. Ultras are known for their use of banners, flares and chanting to intimidate the opposition. Team sports seem to be more conducive to creating hardcore supporters, you typically don’t see the same level of communal support for golfers or professional mixed martial arts fighters. This brings us to the topic of this article, fandom in esports. Prospective esports fans coming from a traditional sports background may be curious as to the type of fans that exist in esports. Fandom in esports is an interesting case. Since esports has its roots in online play, geography is less of a factor than in traditional sports. Obviously, in GAA or football, a team has to travel to a physical space to play another team. This means local physical spaces (e.g GAA pitches) have to be created to facilitate these sports. Naturally, people who live in a local area will join a local club. This then leads to local fans supporting the local team which is made up of their neighbours. Esports doesn’t require these spaces, which means teams are made up of players who may not live anywhere close to one another. However, esports is constrained by geography in one way. Ping. Ping is how fast a server can read someone’s inputs. Obviously, in a video game where there are a lot of rapid inputs, having this number as low as possible is a priority. Even playing at 100 milliseconds of ping can be incredibly frustrating for a player. In this way, esports is gated by geography. Most esports competitions occur on Local Area Network (LAN) so ping is zero, enabling players to utilise the full extent of their reaction times. However, as someone needs to physically be in a location to play on LAN, this creates situations where competitions often occur in a centralised location within a region. For example, the League of Legends European Championships (LEC) take place in Berlin and the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) take place in Los Angeles. Because of this regional clustering, esports fans tended to gravitate towards supporting an entire region rather than an individual team. This is also because large esports tend to have an international tournament each year where the best teams from every region compete. For League of Legends, this is the World Championships, for DotA, this is The International, for fighting games, this is the Evolution Championship Series. This is where tribalism tends to come into play in esports. There are famous and very heated regional rivalries. The history of League of Legends has historically been dominated by Korean teams. South Korean Telecom T1 has won the competition a record three times. However, recently Chinese teams have been finding success, winning two of the last three world championships. This has created an intense rivalry between Korean and Chinese fans, with both sets of fans being particularly fierce about the performance of their teams. “Swimming back home” is a common threat thrown out by Chinese fans after one of their representatives underperforms. Despite the animosity between both setsof fans, it is extremely common for Korean players to play in the League of Legends Pro League (LPL), the Chinese league. In fact, two of the most recognisable LPL players Kim “Doinb” Tae-sang and Song “Rookie” Eui-jin are both Korean. In the Western League sphere, there is also a catty rivalry between North American fans and European fans. Neither region has won a World Championship since 2011 (when Europe’s Fnatic took home the trophy) but Europe has almost always outperformed North America in international tournaments. I wouldn’t describe this rivalry as quite as intense as the Korean/Chinese matchup but if one were to look at the Twitch chat of any international match they would find that 90% of the messages are in some way making fun of either Europe or North America. Generally speaking, besides the occasional unusually good European team (G2 Esports), neither North America nor Europe tends to win international tournaments so the bragging rights in this rivalry come from which region performs better against the Korean and Chinese teams. Just because regional rivalry constitutes a large part of the tribalism found in esports doesn’t mean that “team” (club) support doesn’t exist. Generally speaking, the largest esports teams attract a dedicated individual following. In Europe, the classic rivalry is between fans of Fnatic and fans of G2 Esports (the old kings versus the new kings is the tagline often used). North America has a more dispersed fandom with 100 Thieves, Team Solomid, Cloud 9 and Team Liquid all having a significant following. There is a level of team fandom in esports, but the difference is that without a real geographical anchor (besides region) fans choose their teams more so than their teams choosing them. In football, Hull City will always have the support of people from Hull. In League of Legends, there is often no draw for fans to support a team like the Golden Guardians who have never finished in the top half of the LCS since their creation. There has been a move in recent years towards anchoring esports teams to a geographic area. Franchised leagues like the Overwatch League and the Call of Duty League required teams buying into the league to create a new brand based on a city. Overwatch League has teams from all over the world, for example, the Los Angeles Gladiators, the London Spitfire, the Seoul Dynasty and the Shanghai Dragons. The Call of Duty League adopted a similar style of team naming conventions (clearly inspired by American leagues like the NFL) with team names like Atlanta FaZe, Toronto Ultra and Dallas Empire. As to whether these teams have attracted a local following from these cities, I can’t personally say. The pandemic derailed the Overwatch League’s attempt to introduce “home” events in some of their team’s cities. As of now, teams that aren’t anchored to cities like Team Solomid still have a much larger fanbase than city-based teams. Only time will tell if esports teams will continue to attempt to “headquarter” in a specific area or if Los Angeles will continue to pull the majority of the North American industry towards its shore. Perhaps as esports matures, we will see fans become more fanatical about specific teams? The seeds have certainly been planted. -