Esports and traditional sports are often pitted against one another as a competition to determine which one is better. From an outside perspective, they have almost nothing in common. Yet esports and traditional sports share the same values and the same philosophy.
So what exactly are the differences between esports and traditional sports, and what do they share? Is esport a legitimate sport?
Sports are the workout of the body, while esports are that of the brain. Simple enough, until we look at chess.
Chess is officially recognized as a sport by the International Olympic Committee. While that doesn’t make it an Olympic category, it’s still a sport, just one that doesn’t involve physical activity. Furthermore, the digital version of chess is an esport despite following the exact same way the physical counterpart does. If a discipline can be both a sport and an esport at the same time, is there really a strict line separating them?
There are similar examples with Olympic categories, too. Whereas archery is a whole-body workout, skeet shooting only mobilizes the fingers and eyes, the way a video game would. Regardless, skeet shooting is still a sport at the Olympics.
So if skeet shooting and chess are sports, should Counter-Strike and League of Legends also be so? Officially, esports aren’t legitimate sports, but the line seems arbitrary.
Is esport a legitimate sport? The finals of the 2025 Chess World Cup. Image Source: Michal Walusza / FIDE
For the most part, sports are far bigger than esports. The finals of the football World Cup are major enough an event to cause nationwide celebration for the winners. The whole world will talk about it on the day of the event. Aside from the United States, perhaps, which will instead give that importance to American football and basketball.
On the other hand, esports tournaments are quieter. League of Legends has the most popular esports scene, yet few people outside the gaming community will talk about the LoL Worlds Finals.
The numbers should tell a different story. Each year, said finals draws over 100 million concurrent viewers across the globe. However, people will far more readily talk about sports than esports. The former is mainstream, while the latter remains stigmatised.
This is no longer the case in China, though. The majority of the League of Legends viewers come from this country, and the Worlds finals is cause for national celebration whenever China wins.
South Korea follows a similar path. Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok, LoL’s undisputed best pro player, is a national celebrity and one of the most well-known and most respected public figures in Korea.
Are esports bigger than sports? An entire stadium is filled for the 2017 LoL World Championship. Image Source: Riot Games
People watch sports and esports for completely different reasons. Esports are about the love of the game; sports, the love of the sport. It’s the League, CS, and Valorant players who watch the tournaments of their respective games. Watching the game being played at the highest level is most of the appeal.
Sports have none of that. Most people who watch a competition don’t play it themselves. The appeal is national pride. Since people will talk about the matches, there’s also the social injunction to know what happened. With regular sports being very simple to understand visually and to grasp the rules of, that injunction is easy to follow.
Esports don’t even have national pride, let alone pride in one’s city. Players find their favorite teams or players. At international competition, it’s about the region rather than the country. In fact, most games don’t have a World Cup; instead, the major tournament is an invitational.
Sports have been a matter of country or city for millennia. The players represent their nation in a discipline that can bring the world together. With sports being physical, there’s also no alternative.
Esports, on the other hand, don’t carry that historic dynasty. Furthermore, they’re not bound to proximity thanks to the Internet, creating a totally different playing field.
Esports vs sports: Dozens and thousands gather to watch a screen at the 2014 LoL Worlds finals. Image Source: Riot Games
Esports salaries have tremendously grown in the past decade, to the point where they became unsustainable for the teams and had to drop back down.
Even at their peak, they remained orders of magnitude lower than their sports equivalents. In sports, most professional scenes give yearly salaries in the millions of US dollars. The best football players earn up to $20 million a year.
The best-paid esports athletes get a seven-figure salary and can also breach the eight-figure mark, but it’s for the rest of the professional world that the number drops drastically. The average revenue an esports player makes is around $130,000 a year.
One key difference between sports and esports is that the former stagnates while the latter constantly evolves.
Sports are centuries old, often even millenia. Over this period, they barely even change. Nor do they need to: sports are a tool to showcase physical (or intellectual) prowess. These disciplines aren’t elaborate, and any complexity would get in the way of their purpose.
Esports are the polar opposite. Most competitive games receive updates biweekly or monthly. Card games like Magic: the Gathering can go longer without patches. However, even they introduce major changes every couple of months.
The ability to adapt to these changes is part of the skill of an esports athlete. In fact, a game becomes boring if it doesn’t get updated regularly. Some rare competitive games don’t receive updates, but these are unique exceptions. Examples include:
This evolving aspect also goes one step further. Esports are all controlled by private companies. Riot Games can unilaterally overhaul the meta of Valorant, Blizzard of Overwatch, and so on, or even shut down the game and the profession alongside. No one has such power in regular sports.
The federations can change the rules, such as when the International Football Association Board introduced video assistant referees.
However, these changes are extremely rare in sports, and they also don’t affect one’s ability to play said sport. People are still free to play sports the way they want outside of official matches, while the publisher has universal control over a game accessed on a computer.
This was apparent when Blizzard pulled the plug on the Heroes of the Storm competitive scene, effectively forcing the teams to shut down their HotS teams overnight.
Esports vs sports: The Summoner’s Rift is displayed in the center of the stadium for the 2017 LoL World Championship. Image Source: Riot Games
Here is a comparison of esports vs sports, looking at the advantages and downsides of each.
| Sports | Esports | |
|---|---|---|
| Average career length | 3 to 17 years | 4 to 8 years |
| Average yearly salary (in USD) | Seven-figure | Low six-figure |
| Fame | National or global | Niche |
| Practicing and path to pro | Players can’t practice at will. Teenagers and young adults are regularly scammed by people pretending to be recruiters for professional teams. | Players can practice at will in real conditions. Organizations are more transparent, and the risk of being scammed by someone posing as a recruiter is low. |
| Talent pipeline | It’s hard to be noticed as an amateur, to be picked up, and to move up in the leagues. | There is visibility on amateurs, and high-level casual players can have shots at moving up. |
| Experience as an amateur | Amateurs play a sport and work out on their way to improve, yielding results even without reaching the pro scene. | Amateurs play a game as they practice to get better, which is considered unproductive. |
| Health risks | Sports are physically intensive and lead to all kinds of accidents. American football has the lowest average career length due to the certainty of severe bodily harm over time. Sports accidents can leave permanent damage or even be fatal. | Playing video games can gradually damage the wrists, neck, and eyes. Besides the risks from a bad lifestyle, a wrist injury is the worst accident an Esports athlete can realistically have. |
| Retirement prospects | Sports athletes can retire and live off of their past earnings, or move into backstage sports positions. However, they must maintain a high level of physical activity since their body got used to it. | Esports players aren’t set for life at the end of their careers. They can take on backstage Esports positions, move elsewhere in the gaming industry, or quietly take on a completely different path in life. |
Featured Image Source: Christina Oh / Riot Games
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