For the thousands of ticketholders stepping into Paris’ Expo Porte de Versailles for this year’s Esports World Cup, a cacophonous sensory experience awaits. As a sea of fans, many donning Team Vitality jerseys in support of the French hometown club, make their way through the sprawling venue, it’s clear that the third iteration of the annual international tournament is gaming at its most maximalist. Wall-to-wall virtual and physical activations, demo kiosks, and shopping pop-ups fill the cavernous space, with roaring crowds and abrupt surges of gameplay audio coming from all directions.
The different scenes on the showroom floor feel endlessly shifting, which is by design — over the course of seven weeks, the venue will be refreshed many times to accommodate 24 individual tournaments, all in service to the Esports World Cup’s Club Championship. But deeper into the oasis of fandom is another, more secret level that most attendees will never see. Here lies the players lounge, where hundreds of competitors, club managers, and event organizers commune in between the action.
It’s a sanctuary for players to unwind and socialize before finding focus — sometime after a scheduled massage or manicure. It’s also here where you’ll likely find one of the key minds behind the experience, Hans Jagnow. As the Director of Clubs, National Teams and Player Relations, he and his team are working tirelessly to ensure competitors are operating in peak form and supported on a personal level.
We want them to be rock stars.” Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century But building rock stars requires work. Jagnow and his peers at the Esports Foundation were also up against it this time around after pivoting the entire tournament from its original home in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to Paris in just a handful of weeks. Fortunately, Jagnow has built a career on that sort of pressure.
In his three years at the Esports Foundation, Jagnow is called on when a puzzle demands a swift, yet elegant solution. While not the first major challenge of his career, the inaugural Esports World Cup was definitely an eye-opener, necessitating a blind leap into a project that was then in early development. We announced it in the New Global Sport Conference.
I feel like, sometimes, I’m the person that gets called when you have six weeks, and you need to bring something to life.” The EWC wasn’t his first foray into esports, however. His passion for social gaming emerged early, as far back as 2000, when an 11-year-old Jagnow convinced his grandmother to accompany him to an age-restricted competitive event in his home country of Germany. The game was 16- or 18-plus, and so watching people play also required you to be a certain age.
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