In a few months, the Lanxess Arena in Cologne will once again become a cathedral for e-sports fans - this time, 15,000 fans of the video game Counter-Strike are expected to make the pilgrimage to Germany's largest event hall. For the organizer, the Electronic Sports League (ESL), it is a home game. Ralf Reichert founded the company in Cologne in 2000 - last year, the Saudi Savvy Gaming Group bought ESL for around one billion US dollars and merged the company with its competitor FACEIT to form the ESL FACEIT Group. Founder and e-sports pioneer Reichert thus gave up his last shares in ESL and is enjoying his new role outside the executive chair.

Mr. Reichert, what have you done recently?

Travel and wine. I learned that you can buy good wine. I thought for a long time that all wine is the same.

The Saudi Savvy Gaming Group bought ESL, the e-sports company you founded, for around one billion US dollars. Did you toast the exit with wine?

No, I did that with a beer. It wasn't the first time we had sold shares in ESL. During the first shareholder transactions, as the founder I tried to keep as many shares as possible, but each time it became less and less. But I remained CEO or co-CEO. Now I've sold all my shares for the first time, which was only a single-digit percentage - but enough for me to buy some wine.

How has your role in the company changed?

With the sale, I moved into a non-operational Chairman role. I represent the company, contribute my experience to strategic decisions and manage various stakeholders - teams, game manufacturers and sponsors. What I no longer do: I am responsible for the operational performance of the company.

Do you enjoy that?

Absolutely, yes. Over the 25 years, the job has always changed due to the development of e-sports, and I really loved that time. But I'm now at a stage in my life with two children, aged nine and eleven, where I'm glad to no longer have this constant responsibility and the time investment that comes with it. At the same time, I'm happy to continue being part of the journey.

What was it like to put ESL in other hands?

The transition took place a long time ago and I'm super happy with the new management - and if I don't like something strategically, I'm asked and can have my say. I may have given up my baby, but I'm still allowed to look after it regularly.

What motivated you to found the ESL back then?

This has been a long time coming. I myself am a passionate gamer. I played on my first Atari in 1980, at a time when gaming was still a real niche industry. I competed with my two brothers and friends on every platform available to a teenager: from video games to soccer to tennis. In the late nineties, I went to university to study business administration and had access to the internet and the first internet communities very early on. In 1996, there was the first real online game with a community, called Quake. We played it for fun and then founded Team SK Gaming, which became one of the best in Europe. With ESL, we wanted to create the infrastructure for e-sports for the first time.

Would you have thought back then that the idea would be so successful?

It was already clear to us in 2000 that gaming would become the biggest entertainment medium in the world. Because it was and is much more interactive, much deeper and much more intelligent than the passive consumption of videos. And it also made perfect sense to us that e-sports would become the competitive part of gaming and eventually fill stadiums.

In the early 2000s, however, gaming did not have the best public reputation: adults saw it as a waste of time, video games were made the scapegoat for school shootings. Wasn't that a risky environment for a start-up?

Every new medium brings with it a certain generational conflict. Whether it's books, music or cinema - whenever a new medium is invented, people are initially afraid of the new. A typical founder's job is to explain disruptions. In our case, educating our parents' generation took longer than we thought. Instead of three to five years, it was more like 13 years before gaming was more widely accepted in society.

So you first needed stamina. When did the business click?

Between 2002 and 2012, there were a lot of near-death experiences where individual deals saved ESL's life. From around 2010, the business environment was much better for us: gaming was more socially established; internet penetration was more advanced; many multiplayer games were free; thanks to Twitter and other social platforms, we had the first e-sports media; Twitch and YouTube enabled people to watch e-sports from anywhere. All of these effects together acted like a fire accelerator, allowing us to grow internationally very quickly.

How important was the one-billion-dollar exit as a sign for e-sports?

Of course it was a nice thing, but a full stadium always has a bigger effect. The one billion is an abstract figure, a sold-out Lanxess Arena with 15,000 people exploding with emotion is always nicer in the end.

The buyer is backed by the Public Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund from Saudi Arabia. Critics believe that the ESL has sold off values that it has stood for for years, such as diversity and equal rights. Was this an issue before the sale?

Of course we thought about it for a long time, we didn't build up the ESL over 20 years and then just risk it like that. I was in Saudi Arabia and talked to a lot of people. We had the feeling that we could trust them and that they were pushing for social development in Saudi Arabia. I always like to be part of further development rather than standing on the sidelines and saying you can't do it.

The FAZ once described you as the Ecclestone of e-sports. Bernie Ecclestone was the face and CEO of Formula 1 for more than 40 years. Has digital competition overtaken traditional sports or does it still have some catching up to do?

E-sports now has 700 million fans, there are only a handful of sports that are bigger. Formula 1, for example, is smaller, but you're also comparing a category with a discipline. E-sports is divided into a wide variety of games. The gaming industry in general is one of the largest entertainment industries with an estimated turnover of 220 billion US dollars this year. It is therefore only a matter of time before an e-sports discipline makes it into the top five global sports. This is not a challenge to traditional sport, I see it as part of the same pie.

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Thank you very much for the interview.

Personal details: Ralf Reichert, 48, is the founder of ESL and is considered a pioneer and trailblazer for today's e-sports hype. In 2022, the company was sold for one billion US dollars, making Reichert famous beyond the borders of e-sports.

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