Fnatic CEO Sam Mathews on the rise of mobile eSports and why its team members are getting into mindfulness

Londoners make millions playing video games — all thanks to Fnatic
Fnatic's League of Legends team competing in Athens earlier this month
Riot Games
Amelia Heathman26 September 2019

Sam Mathews describes himself as a child of the world, which is helpful considering he is founder and CEO of one of the planet’s biggest eSports brands.

The 35-year-old set up Fnatic 15 years ago and it’s home to some of the top players in the industry, who have won more than 200 competitions and in excess of £10 million in prize money, competing in leagues watched by hundreds of millions of people. Think Real Madrid but digital. He is also on this year’s Progress 1000 list.

It’s fairly recently that eSports reached cultural mass in the UK. Remember the 16-year-old who took home £2.4 million after winning the Fortnite World Cup? That’s only one professional competition and one game. Popular titles include League of Legends (LoL), Overwatch and Dota 2. At the LoL World Championship last year in South Korea, 100 million people tuned in.

The livestreaming platform Twitch, acquired by Amazon for £780 million in 2014, has been partly responsible for this rise.

Fnatic CEO Sam Mathews got into video games 15 years ago, "when it took almost a supercomputer and Nasa scientists to go online" (Anand Mohapatra for REFRACTOR )
Anand Mohapatra for REFRACTOR

Born in Roehampton, Mathews moved to Hong Kong aged five and then Australia before returning to London at 18. A rugby player when he was growing up, he got into gaming online and realised the thrill he felt during a 90-minute match could be accessed anytime he wanted. “This was 15 years ago, when it took almost a supercomputer and Nasa scientists to go online and play video games,” he laughs.

“If you think about what sports is, it’s a game. Football, you put a ball in a net, basketball, you put it through a hoop. With video gaming, you can do whatever you imagine and that gives it a bigger advantage. And you can play it anytime, anywhere.”

This is particularly the case when it comes to mobile, where competing is picking up speed thanks to games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), which has 50 million casual players in India alone. Fnatic recently established a partnership with Chinese smartphone company OnePlus, which now has a “Fnatic Mode” in its devices to boost the gaming experience and minimise notifications so players can score points on the move.

Mathews says his mission with Fnatic is to get eSports in every household across the world. There are 60 Fnatic players, competing professionally in games including Fornite and Counter-Strike. The Counter-Strike team, made up of five players, is considered one of the best in the world.

They have access to coaches, analysts, and editors (to boost their YouTube content), and Mathews is adding mindfulness practice and psychologists. “At last year’s LoL World Final, one of the differentiators between us and the winning team was that we were not being strong enough in the week running up to the final on sleep schedule, nutrition, and mindfulness. It’s the most intense stage in the world, 100 million people watching, 50,000 in the audience.”

Right now, the focus is on building up the Shoreditch HQ, adding training spaces and YouTube rooms for the players to work on developing their own brands as well as Fnatic’s. “Shoreditch represents a lot of the innovation coming out of London right now. There’s access to innovative people and it’s fresh, constantly moving.”

Fnatic was one of the first companies to have professional Fortnite players so it needs to stay ahead of the competition, whether that’s establishing a PUBG team in India, or looking out for the way immersive technologies will change sports.

“Virtual reality has huge potential as it becomes more accessible. It’s going to open up insane viewing opportunities, like watching a game in a virtual stadium, surrounded by a billion avatars. It’s going to be interesting.”

  • The Progress 1000, in partnership with the global bank Citi, is the Evening Standard’s celebration of the people changing London’s future for the better and will be announced on October 3.

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