When Team Liquid signed its first players in 2000, it was a group of StarCraft enthusiasts competing for fun and modest prize money. By 2024, it had become a global organization with teams across a dozen game titles, a training facility in Utrecht, partnerships with major brands including Honda and Alienware, and a media operation producing original content watched by millions.

Team Liquid’s evolution is not unique. Across the esports industry, organizations that started as collections of talented players have been systematically building the kind of brand infrastructure that traditional sports franchises took decades to develop. The smart ones understand something important: the game you play today may not be the game your audience cares about in five years. The brand is the durable asset. The game is the vehicle.

1. Why Esports Organizations Cannot Rely on Game Titles Alone

Traditional sports franchises benefit from competitive structures that are, by design, permanent. The NFL will always need 32 teams. The Premier League will always need 20 clubs. The game itself is protected by governing bodies, legal structures, and institutional inertia that make the sport essentially permanent as long as there is an audience for it.

Esports organizations operate in a fundamentally different environment. The game they compete in is a product controlled by a private company that can change its competitive structure, reduce prize pools, alter game mechanics that affect competitive viability, or shut down its esports support entirely. Riot Games controls League of Legends. Valve controls Counter-Strike and Dota 2. Epic controls Fortnite. The relationship between publisher and esports organization is more like a landlord-tenant relationship than the franchise ownership model of traditional sports.

This structural vulnerability creates an existential incentive for esports organizations to build brand equity that is independent of any single game. A fan base loyal to a team, not just to a game, follows that team across titles. Brand recognition that extends beyond gaming creates commercial opportunities not dependent on any publisher’s decisions. This is why the organizations building the most durable esports businesses are the ones investing most heavily in brand-building that transcends their current competitive titles.

2. The Content Creator Strategy That Changed Everything

The most significant strategic shift in esports brand-building over the past decade has been the integration of content creators as organizational assets alongside competitive rosters.

Gaming organizations recognized that content creators, streamers and YouTubers with large dedicated audiences, provided something that competitive rosters alone could not: consistent, daily engagement with large audiences regardless of tournament schedules. Competitive esports events happen intermittently. Content is produced daily.

100 Thieves built its brand explicitly around this model, signing creators like Valkyrae and Nickmercs alongside its competitive teams and investing in a content house in Los Angeles that produced gaming and lifestyle content designed to build the brand beyond specific game titles. The organization’s merchandise line, launched in 2018, sold out repeatedly, demonstrating that brand affinity extended to consumer products far removed from gaming competition.

FaZe Clan took the creator-centric approach even further, building an organization that became as much a lifestyle brand and talent management company as an esports organization. Its FaZe5 recruitment series, which treated joining FaZe as aspirational, was a brand-building exercise as much as a talent acquisition strategy.

3. Merchandise and the Fan Economy

Traditional sports generate substantial revenue from merchandise: jerseys, hats, memorabilia, and branded products that fans purchase to signal their affiliation. Esports organizations have recognized this revenue stream and are building toward it with varying degrees of sophistication.

The challenge for esports merchandise is that the traditional sports jersey model, where fans wear their team’s jersey in public, translates imperfectly to esports because the cultural visibility of esports team affiliation is lower than traditional sports outside dedicated gaming communities. Esports organizations have consequently focused on lifestyle merchandise, streetwear-adjacent clothing and accessories that are desirable as fashion objects independent of their esports affiliation, allowing the brand to reach audiences beyond dedicated fans.

Cloud9’s approach to merchandise has treated the brand as a streetwear label as much as a sports franchise, collaborating with fashion brands and producing limited-edition drops that generate attention and demand beyond its competitive gaming audience. This cross-over approach builds brand recognition with audiences who may not follow esports closely but are receptive to a brand that occupies the intersection of gaming and street culture.

4. Brand Partnerships and the Corporate Integration

Major corporations have committed substantial resources to esports sponsorship as the audience’s size and demographics have become clearer. Esports audiences skew young, are highly engaged, and are difficult to reach through traditional advertising channels. For brands targeting this demographic, esports partnerships offer access that television advertising cannot provide.

The most sophisticated esports organizations have moved beyond simple logo placement to partnerships that integrate brands into content and competitive experiences in ways that feel relevant rather than intrusive. Red Bull’s long-standing presence in esports is built around content production, training facilities, and athlete support that makes the brand genuinely relevant to the competitive gaming community rather than simply visible.

Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and other premium automotive brands have made significant esports commitments, recognizing that the audience includes a significant proportion of young professionals with income and aspiration that match their target demographics. These partnerships validate esports as a serious marketing environment and bring sponsorship budgets that support organizational growth.

5. The Franchise League Model and Its Complications

Several major esports titles have introduced franchise league models, borrowed from American professional sports, where organizations purchase permanent slots in leagues rather than qualifying through competitive play. Riot’s League of Legends Championship Series and Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch League adopted this model, charging organizations millions of dollars for league slots in exchange for revenue sharing, production support, and competitive stability.

The franchise model was designed to give organizations the stability needed to invest in brand-building with confidence. If a team cannot be relegated based on performance, it can make long-term infrastructure investments, sign long-term creator contracts, and develop the organizational depth needed to build a durable brand.

The results have been more complicated than proponents hoped. Several franchise leagues have contracted significantly from their initial scale as game popularity has shifted. Some organizations have exited leagues they paid tens of millions to enter. The model’s dependence on specific game titles has not been eliminated by franchising; it has been front-loaded into large buy-in costs.

6. Geographic Identity and the Community Anchor

Traditional sports franchises build fan loyalty partly through geographic identity. The Chicago Cubs are Chicago’s team. Manchester United is tied to Manchester in ways that transcend any roster or championship run. Esports organizations have historically lacked this geographic anchor, operating as global brands without local roots.

Several organizations are attempting to build geographic identity as a brand-building strategy, partnering with cities, establishing physical presences in specific markets, and building local fan communities that create place-based loyalty rather than purely parasocial brand affinity.

Philadelphia Fusion in the Overwatch League explicitly built its brand around Philadelphia identity, engaging local media and establishing community presence in ways that distinguished it from globally oriented competitors. Whether this geographic strategy produces the loyalty it aims for in an esports context where most fans interact with teams entirely through online content remains to be seen, but the attempt reflects a sophisticated understanding of what makes sports brands durable.

7. The Long Game: Building Institutions, Not Just Organizations

The esports organizations that will still be operating and thriving twenty years from now are the ones that understand they are building institutions, not just gaming organizations. Institutions have values, histories, cultures, and community relationships that outlast any specific game, any roster, or any moment in competitive gaming.

Team Liquid’s investment in player wellbeing, mental health resources, and coaching infrastructure has built a reputation for organizational excellence that attracts top talent across titles. Cloud9’s investment in content infrastructure has built audience relationships that persist regardless of competitive results. These investments take years to pay off and require conviction that the brand being built is worth the patience the investment demands.

Conclusion

The esports organizations building the most durable brands are doing so by understanding that competitive performance is the foundation, not the ceiling. The ceiling is brand equity: the recognition, affinity, and loyalty that persist regardless of which game is currently popular or which titles are generating the largest prize pools. Building toward that ceiling requires the same long-term, identity-driven, community-building work that successful brands in every other industry have always required. The organizations that understand this are not just building esports teams. They are building the sports franchises of the next generation.