Former Basketball star buys League of Legends eSports team
News on 22 Dec 2015
News on 22 Dec 2015
The competitive Team Gravity League of Legends eSports team has been bought for a million dollars by former National Basketball star Rick Fox.
Fox, who played for the LA Lakers and Boston Celtics in a sparkling 14 year professional career, has revealed that he plans to rebrand the team as Echo Fox and enter it in the North American League of Legends Championship Series, which features two leagues of 20-teams, one from North America and one from Europe. The top three teams from each league compete in the League of Legends World Championships.
The publication IGN reports that Fox may have some team-building ahead; Gravity Gaming did not qualify for the 2015 League of Legends World Championship, and since then, much of the team has moved on.
Though Fox has had no professional involvement in eSports in the past, SB Nation noted that the basketball player and actor has shown an interest in the community, calling pro-gamers athletes, and chatting about League of Legends with Utah Jazz player Gordon Haywood, who is active in the League of Legends scene.
In eSports, video-game players (or teams of players) compete against each other in front of live and online audiences.
Bloomberg business news reports that the overall global audience is estimated at more than 200 million, mostly outside the U.S., according to an October report from brokerage firm Robert W. Baird & Co.
Overall revenue is expected to grow from around $300 million this year to $1 billion by 2018.
League of Legends is the most popular eSports game measured by game-play, according to the report from Baird. More than 27 million people watched the 2014 League of Legends World Championship, compared to the 19.9 million who watched the NBA finals in 2015. In addition, 11,000 fans took seats at Madison Square Garden to watch the event live.
Speaking about the growth of eSports, Fox said in a statement: “I see the way that the eSports world is growing and I know we are on the verge of something massive.”
