In 2020, I took the creative lead at Jung von Matt for BMW’s eSports partnership with six of the world’s biggest eSports teams. The timing couldn’t have been more interesting. Competitive gaming was experiencing a massive surge in popularity, and brands were lining up to become part of the movement.

Why was everyone suddenly so excited about eSports? The numbers seemed to justify the hype. In 2019, ESL reported that its major tournaments had seen a 90% increase in average minute audience, a 190% increase in hours watched and a 55% increase in video views compared with the same period in 2018. The Intel Extreme Masters Katowice event alone attracted 174,000 visitors across its two weekends, and its combined tournaments generated 157 million hours watched and 232 million accumulated daily viewers.

BMW was among the brands entering this growing market. Alongside several other major brands investing between 2019 and 2022, BMW launched its United in Rivalry partnership.
The idea was rooted in the brand’s heritage: competition.
Rivalry has always been part of BMW’s DNA, whether on the racetrack, in technological development or in the pursuit of performance.

And what better environment to bring that idea to life than one in which rivalry is practically the whole point? The teams involved were competing against each other, too.

United in Rivalry was a simple, memorable creative platform and the perfect umbrella for the partnership.

What could possibly go wrong? Well, there was one thing: COVID-19.

What Does an eSports Team Sponsorship Actually Include?

Sponsorship agreements differ considerably in scope, but many fundamentals are familiar from traditional sports. Players wear branded jerseys, appear in advertising campaigns, take part in digital content productions and represent their sponsors at events, both online and in person.

So what makes an eSports sponsorship valuable beyond visibility? The players can become brand ambassadors, giving a brand access to their communities, their credibility and, ideally, a relationship with fans that conventional advertising would struggle to establish.

The key word here is ideally. A successful sponsorship is more than a logo on a jersey. There needs to be a genuine strategic fit between the brand and the people representing it. If that connection works, the brand becomes a natural part of the community rather than an unwanted advertising interruption.

How Do You Create a Global eSports Campaign During a Pandemic?

In 2020 COVID-19 was our biggest challenge. Live events disappeared, physical activations became impossible and the usual ways of bringing sponsors, teams and fans together were suddenly off the table. At the same time, the pandemic was also an accelerator for the whole industry: with much of everyday life suddenly happening on screen, gaming and streaming gained even more attention. That helps to explain why expectations rose so quickly, and why the correction hit so hard afterwards.

Our six teams were spread across three continents, operating in different time zones and separated by travel restrictions. Even putting the players on a plane for a production shoot wasn’t an option.

How do you bring six international eSports teams together when none of them can actually meet? We needed a creative format that didn’t depend on real-world production, physical proximity or getting everyone into the same room. Manga turned out to be the perfect solution.

One of our first major creative responses was Heroes of Rivalry, a manga-inspired storytelling project featuring players from the participating teams. Instead of trying to recreate the familiar world of sports advertising under impossible conditions, we created an entirely new universe that could bring the teams together without requiring them to meet physically.

The original idea came from a very personal place. I’ve been reading manga almost every day for close to twenty years. It’s practically my bedtime reading routine: lying in bed with my iPad, twenty browser tabs open, catching up on the latest chapters.

At the time, Isekai was one of the dominant manga genres. The concept is fairly straightforward: ordinary people from our world suddenly find themselves transported into an alternate universe, where they embark on extraordinary adventures filled with fantasy, action and unexpected challenges.

So why not do the same with our protagonists?

We took professional eSports players from the participating teams and placed them in an entirely different world, creating a story in which they became the heroes of their own adventure. BMW and its products played a role in this universe, naturally, but the main attraction was the story itself: the characters, the action and the world they inhabited.

Later campaigns followed the same spirit. In Pimp My Rivalry, the teams designed art cars as their team vehicles, supported by local designers from their respective markets. Both projects delivered considerable reach. The community responded very positively, and the way the partnership enabled the teams was particularly praised.

It was a great creative experience. But working with professional eSports teams also came with a few lessons we hadn’t necessarily anticipated.

What Makes Working With eSports Teams Different?

Professional gaming careers can be considerably shorter than those of footballers or tennis players, and the professional structures surrounding teams and players are still evolving. Experience in dealing with major brands, agencies and international marketing campaigns is not always as extensive as in more established sports.

That doesn’t make collaboration difficult, but it does mean the everyday process needs more attention: more coordination, more feedback rounds, more conversations about what works and what doesn’t.

And there’s the question of authenticity. How do you translate a brand’s positioning into the words and personalities of individual players without making it sound artificial? How do you create content that feels natural to their communities while making sure the players are comfortable in front of a camera? That’s simply part of the learning curve when two industries with different levels of marketing experience come together.

And here’s the interesting part: over the four years of our partnership, things didn’t become more difficult. Quite the opposite. We developed a rhythm, learned each other’s expectations and produced a range of different projects, and the collaboration became more natural over time.

That experience gave me a good understanding of what brands should expect when entering the world of competitive gaming: enormous creative potential, but also a different kind of working relationship.

Why Did eSports Sponsorship Become Such a Big Thing?

Between 2019 and 2022, eSports sponsorship attracted serious money and seriously big names. BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Red Bull, Mastercard, Intel and other global brands were investing in teams, competitions and gaming ecosystems.

The appeal was obvious: access to younger audiences, highly engaged communities and a culture that was increasingly difficult for traditional media to reach.

Then the correction came.

In 2022, 100 Thieves saw six major sponsorship agreements expire, including those with Rocket Mortgage and Cash App. TSM scaled back significant parts of its competitive operations, and FaZe Clan experienced a dramatic collapse in its corporate valuation after its stock market debut. In 2023, BMW ended its team sponsorship activities, including its relationships with organisations such as G2 Esports and Fnatic.

What Happened When the eSports Hype Started to Fade?

For a while, it seemed as though eSports organisations could do no wrong. Growing audiences, increasingly ambitious tournaments and the arrival of global brands created expectations of a rapidly expanding business.

Why didn’t growing audiences automatically translate into successful businesses? Because audience growth and commercial success are two very different things. Many organisations had built expensive structures around the assumption that sponsorship revenues would keep growing. Professional players, management, production, facilities and international operations all come with substantial costs. When brands began reassessing their investments, some of those business models suddenly looked considerably less attractive.

FaZe Clan is perhaps the most extreme example. After going public at a valuation of approximately $725 million, the company was acquired by GameSquare in a deal valuing it at around $17 million.

So what exactly happened? Probably a bit of everything, but above all a correction. Expectations and valuations had grown faster than revenues, and the bubble burst across industries at that time. In many sectors, including automotive, economic uncertainty led to cost-cutting. eSports was simply no longer exempt.

Yet the broader market was not disappearing. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, global eSports competition revenues reached an estimated $2.34 billion in 2024, with growth to approximately $4.12 billion projected by 2030. The inaugural Esports World Cup in Riyadh in 2024 featured 27 sponsors, including Adidas, Pepsi, KitKat, TikTok, Amazon and Sony. It’s worth noting that the tournament is backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, so part of its appeal is state-supported rather than purely market-driven. And there were organisations showing that sponsorship businesses could recover: 100 Thieves reported 23 new sponsors in 2024 and a sponsorship renewal rate of 75 percent.

Is eSports Marketing Finding a New Way Forward?

If the first phase of eSports sponsorship was about getting a foot in the door, the more useful question today is what a brand can actually achieve there.

Gaming still gives access to audiences that are hard to reach elsewhere: young, highly engaged and passionate about the communities they belong to. But the questions a brand should ask are the same as in any other channel. Do I reach my target group? Can I speak to them in a way that feels natural? And do they like what I do?

The answers depend less on “eSports” as a whole than on where and how a brand shows up. A team, a creator and a major tournament each offer a different kind of access to the community, and each asks for a different kind of brand behaviour.

Are Gaming Creators Becoming More Important Than Teams?

Streamers and creators have something that traditional sponsorship models sometimes struggle to deliver: a direct, ongoing relationship with their audiences.

A team partnership can offer visibility across jerseys, social channels and tournament appearances. A creator partnership can go further, integrating a brand into regular content, livestream collaborations or long-term ambassador relationships.

The question is no longer simply which team has the biggest audience. It’s also which personality can communicate a brand’s message in a way that feels credible and natural.

Are Major Tournaments Replacing Traditional Team Sponsorships?

Large-scale events like the Esports World Cup show that major brands are still willing to invest when the platform offers international visibility, a large audience and room for activation.

Events also provide something purely digital sponsorships cannot: physical experiences. Fan zones, product demonstrations and live activations turn a sponsorship into something audiences actually experience, which is particularly attractive for brands with a strong experiential focus.

So, Is eSports Sponsorship Still a Thing After the Hype?

Absolutely. But the market is no longer operating on the same assumptions that fuelled its initial boom.

Growth and visibility used to be treated as sufficient proof of success. Today, eSports sponsorship is expected to meet the same standards as other major marketing investments: better audience insights, more sophisticated activation concepts and clearer performance indicators. The days when a logo on the jersey of a major team could be sold as a compelling strategy are largely behind us.

Looking back at United in Rivalry, I still believe the fundamental idea was right. As a first step in BMW’s strategy to rejuvenate the brand, it worked: it delivered considerable reach, was embraced by the community and left a lasting impact, especially through the way it enabled the teams.

Gaming communities are passionate, competitive and deeply connected to the people and teams they follow. For brands, that’s an extraordinary environment to become part of.

But entering that world requires more than a sponsorship cheque. It requires an understanding of the culture, the people and the dynamics that make competitive gaming what it is.

The hype may have faded. The game hasn’t.