Sport Industry Private Dining Club Hears From Gfinity

Jonathan Hall, chief operating officer at Gfinity, joined senior figures of rights holders, brands, broadcasters and agencies at the Sport Industry Private Dining Club, hosted by Integro Entertainment & Sport, on Thursday evening.

Organisations in attendance included Wimbledon, Arsenal FC, Twitter, Barclays, ESPN, IG, Under Armour, West Ham United FC, Ascot Racecourse, Discovery, ATP, ITN Productions, Coutts and many more.

Formed by gamers, Gfinity was created to help push eSports within the UK to a professional level, to raise awareness and to provide an arena for gamers to showcase their talent.

Hall was introduced to Gfinity while at Saracens Rugby Club, where he spent five years, by the club’s chairman Nigel Wray, who is also the second largest shareholder in the eSports company.

“I spoke to Nigel about looking to move on from the club at the end of the season and he said to me ‘I’ve just invested in something exciting, this is the next big thing’. That’s how I ended up speaking to Gfinity,” explained Hall.

“I knew next to nothing about eSports before that conversation, but Nigel has a great track record so I looked into it, and was absolutely staggered by the numbers.

“The industry is starting to come to grips with it, but I think some people still don’t quite get how big the audience is. It’s a global audience of a quarter of a billion people, with leading events picking up 40 million viewers by themselves. Prize funds are in the millions of dollars. It’s enormous.”

Speaking candidly to Sport Industry Group’s executive director Alex Coulson, at Heddon Street Kitchen, following networking drinks and dinner, Hall discussed the challenges eSports faces with fitness and perception, commercial opportunities and the aims for the brand moving forward.

“We want to become the world’s leading eSports event tournament organisers. It’s probably a two or three year play, and we have some fantastic investors behind us. The market is fantastic at the moment so there’s a great deal of excitement around the opportunities commercially. The revenue in the industry at the moment is $750m, which is quite big, but actually that’s $3 a fan. If you look at a more conventional sport it’s around $20 to $50 a fan, so the size of the market is still nowhere near where it should be, so there’s fantastic opportunities for commercial partnerships and broadcasters.”

On what eSports can learn from traditional sports, Hall commented: “What eSports companies don’t do well at the moment is hype around the big events. Take UFC for example, they do it brilliantly, if you look at the McGregor vs Aldo fight last year – the atmosphere and the intensity they built up with content around that fight lasted for months. The fight lasted 13 seconds! eSports doesn’t do that, we fly the players in the day before, and while the broadcasts themselves are beautiful and polished, we don’t have that storytelling aspect. So that’s definitely something that eSports can work on. eSports companies need to spend more time on the individual personalities.”

The invitation-only members club meets four times a year at some of the best venues in London, providing top level representatives from across the sport industry with the opportunity to network and socialise in an informal and relaxed setting.

The Sport Industry Private Dining Club is hosted by Integro Entertainment & Sport, an international insurance brokerage and risk management firm, with a specialised entertainment and sport practice that focuses in designing insurance policies to meet the needs of industry organisations.

To find out more about the Sport Industry Private Dining Club please contact Alex Coulson, executive director, Sport Industry Group, at alex.coulson@benchmarksport.com.