I am a huge sports fan. I watch soccer, basketball, football and even hockey during the week. I basically subscribe to pay TV to follow the leagues during the week.
Then came this thing called Pandemic and… Well, we know, everything was paused/suspended/cancelled. And now?
Let’s not just think about the competition, let’s think about the money that turns in every season of each of the sports. Ticket sales, merchandise, food and beverages inside the stadiums, TV broadcasting rights… The impact was certainly grotesque.
Watching sports is a pastime for many people, especially on days considered to be rest. So how to bring entertainment to all the people who are (or should be) at home? Video games turned out to be a good solution.
The NBA followed with the Phoenix Suns
The Phoenix Suns are the team I support in basketball, so I always follow what they do on and off the court. And there I was cruising through their social media when I saw that they were going to follow the NBA calendar after the pandemic, in a very different way – the games would be played through the NBA2k20 game, and streamed live on the franchise channel on Twitch.
The disputes started right after the announcement of the suspension of the season by the NBA, after the announcement of two athletes with COVID-19 – I even posted it on my LinkedIn profile. The Suns was the first sports franchise I saw responsible for bringing video gaming into sports reality.
And the joke for us Suns fans is that the game is so well balanced that the team lost in matches they would surely lose on the “real” courts.
Soccer, the national passion
Globo, which is known for broadcasting football championships on open TV on Wednesdays and Sundays, created a virtual championship with players from national clubs. The championship lasted three days, featured players from six clubs in Brazil and was broadcast on SporTV and Globoesporte.com with narration by Everaldo Marques, one of the great names in sports narration.
Across the ocean, in Europe, we had the UEFA Euro 2020 eTournament played by eight teams with matches broadcast by Twitch, the website of the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) and also by the TimVision platform, which is a subscription streaming service . The final was on 05/24/20 and Italy was crowned champion of the competition.
And the future?
We still don’t know what’s in store for us, as the situation with COVID-19 is new for the entire world. The fact is that this pandemic and the quarantine ended up changing many habits and consumption of all types of entertainment, and the gaming sector was one of the most impacted by this change.
The Bundesliga (German league) is back, the Italian league is showing signs of a comeback and the NBA started to discuss how the competition will be resumed, which already has a date for the restart – July 31st. Other franchises haven’t manifested yet, and here in Brazil as we’re still climbing the curve, we shouldn’t have news anytime soon – although some pretty irresponsible clubs think we can get back to the games.
The fact is that this new type of game and broadcast pleased a lot of people, felt close and connected with their club or franchise of the heart, and brands that took advantage of this opportunity to engage their audience have nothing to complain about. The pandemic came to change a lot, and companies that knew how to best optimize this “new normal” will certainly reap rewards in the future.
Of course, watching a match at home will never be the same as the experience of watching it in a stadium or in the gym, but in times of COVID-19 what matters is health, and if we can follow our sports from the heart of the comfort of home in safety, there’s no reason not to. Now it remains to be seen how these championships and broadcasts will behave when we are a little safer and protected from the virus.
For now I’m not even thinking about going back to the stadium, I’ll just go on with the online matches.
Image by Lyrrad_Skynyrd from Pixabay
