Signing A Team Blind: Can Beasley Esports Make It Work?
Last week, a tournament announcement took the Rocket League scene by surprise. Beasley Esports, owner of the Overwatch League’s Houston Outlaws, announced “The Search For The Next Rocket League Team”, an event to decide who will get signed by the organisation. The team to come out on top of this competition wins a contract worth up to $15,000 per month, as Beasley Esports wants to make this their team for the upcoming RLCS season.
It’s highly unusual to go about signing a team in this way. It leaves a lot up in the air, which is - depending on who you ask - very exciting, or very worrying. Beasley Esports are joining Rocket League esports without knowing who will play for their organisation, and they make us rethink everything we know about scouting players and picking up new teams.
The public conversation that followed the announcement quickly turned to cynicism. Most people aren’t convinced Beasley Esports, or their subsidiary Houston Outlaws, know their way around the Rocket League well enough to make this a success.
Leaving the signing up to chance does not instil confidence in commenters across social media.
Admittedly, it’s easier to see how this could go more wrong than right. They’re going off of one tournament, which might have a lesser team clutching the victory over the overall better team. On top of that, only unsigned teams and players will sign up, while a lot of talent can be bought in the off season from existing rosters. Apparently, Beasley Esports doesn’t want to participate in that market. The salary seems decent, but not amazing, and the organisation wants to provide a coach down the line. Those are all conditions that are enticing to a typical bubble team. But the organisation might need a little more than your average bubble team to get to the RLCS level in North America.
It doesn’t have to be a bad decision, though. Picking up an upcoming team is always a risk. A team that manages to win this competition has at least shown some competence, and they could be as much of a threat as any other up and comer. The support that an organisation the size of Beasley Esports can provide, might be able to take them to the next level.
Operations Director at Houston Outlaws and General Manager for the new Rocket League team, Michael White, sees merit in joining Rocket League: “It has a massive fanbase, a massive playerbase, really great viewership, and not to mention, it’s a top-three game in collegiate campuses,” he explains in an interview with Adam "Lawler" Thornton.
Michael White wants to branch out and expand their reach within esports. “When people look at esports, they see it as a whole, as one single audience. In reality, it’s more like sports, where the Overwatch League has a certain type of audience, and the Rocket League scene has a different type of audience. There may be some overlap between the two audiences, but they are their own individual audiences. For us, it’s taking what we learned from the Overwatch League and the Houston Outlaws, and now applying that to the Rocket League scene, and hopefully expanding the fanbase and playerbase.”
The new Rocket League team will not compete under the Beasley Esports name: just like the Houston Outlaws, the team will get its own branding. “This will actually be a new professional team that will only be announced once the team has been signed.”
The organisation sees this unorthodox way of joining the RLCS as an opportunity, for them and for the players. “The Championships just happened, there’s a little bit of a rostermania going on right now in the scene, where teams are shuffling around. So there is an opportunity that some teams or players that may be left on the outside, now have an opportunity to come together and participate in this tournament, go through the qualifiers, and potentially be signed as a new professional team competing in the RLCS this fall.”
There’s no way to predict what will actually happen in the tournament, who will get signed, and what they can achieve. It’s a new and innovative way of going about esports, and it takes them into unknown territory. Who knows, maybe it’s an act of brilliance, and Beasley Esports get a great deal out of it.
No matter what will happen, though, they’ve let us all know that they’re ready to put themselves out there. If nothing else, their organisation gets a head start in publicity. A wild entrance like this one gets everybody talking.
Operations Director Michael White is at least optimistic: “This is a very long-term play for us. Right now, it’s just kind of dipping our toes in the water, and then just seeing how the landscape is. From there, assessing it and just making sure that we do what we do best, and just have a fun time doing it.”