“When we discovered that the broadcasts of our matches were watched by about a million viewers a month, it was a completely different level of emotions,” recalls Pavel Shapkin, co-owner of the UCC company. In three years, his company went from the regional to the international level, signed a contract with one of the majors from Galaxy Battles, won ~$300,000 in its tournaments in 2017, and also signed a contract with the largest esports holding ESL.
We talked with Pavel about the system of organizing eSports tournaments, finding money for prize funds and getting out of force majeure situations.
Interviewer: Yulia Litvin
Respondent: Pavel Shapkin
UCC currently has about 50 people: what kind of specialists are needed to organize an eSports tournament?
To organize an eSports tournament, it is not necessary for the company to employ 50 people. Purely theoretically, one or two people can do everything. It all depends on the scale of the competition. We only need 50 people to organize high-level championships. This figure will increase in the future.
I don’t presume to judge, like other companies, but in our case, the organization of the championship begins with providing a prize fund. Next, the sales department is included in conjunction with marketing. After we find partners and agree on the list of participants, the sports department gets involved. He determines the structure of the competition, invites teams, in general, creates preliminary agreements with everyone who will participate in this tournament. When the structure of the tournament is ready, marketing comes back into play and applies working tools to this “fish.” Together with our partners, we determine how to most effectively promote their product.
In parallel with this, you need to take care of a lighting studio that will stream the tournament in all necessary languages.
I guess that's all. The sales department, together with the sports department, interacts with the marketing department and with the studio, which will comment on all this. Of course, there are a myriad of little things and details without which the tournament will fail. The business process for organizing a tournament in our company includes 30 A4 pages. We'll talk more about this when we are invited to teach.
How is organizing an event fundamentally different at the regional/Russian/European levels?
First of all, the level of the teams that play in the championship differs. If you do a regional tournament with low-level teams, the requirements for the organization are also quite low - for example, it doesn’t really matter what the broadcasts will be like. If we are talking about a major international tournament, then the teams already have certain conditions and riders. The schedule is agreed upon, and this is quite difficult.
In general, the higher the level of competition, the more interesting it is to organize it. Now we are organizing a CS:GO, Dota 2 tournament in which teams from the top 10 in the world play. These tournaments attract a huge number of people. When we discovered that the number of viewers of our broadcasts was approaching a million per month, we felt a completely different level of emotions, and, most importantly, it gave us a different level of resources. The realization came that the company was becoming international. Therefore, major tournaments, despite all the accompanying stress, are incredibly inspiring.
Since we're talking about stress: do force majeure situations often arise? How do you deal with them?
The most unpleasant situation is when teams are withdrawn from tournaments. For example, at our last championship, a player of one of the teams fell ill, he urgently needed hospitalization, and the team withdrew from the tournament. There are already certain obligations to partners, the tournament and the list of participants have been announced on all news portals. We have to urgently negotiate with our partners and look for a replacement team. And when the tournament is of a high level, the number of teams is limited and it’s not so easy to find a replacement... But these are work situations, we deal with it and move on.
It's hard to remember anything more stressful. Although... We recently helped organize a tournament in the Philippines, which took place in the largest indoor stadium in the world. He had World Championship status, and ten days before the start he was deprived of this status. Imagine what a powerful blow this is - the organizers were deprived of half of the prize fund ($500,000) and rating points, which are awarded only among tournaments that have major status. Several large teams immediately refused to participate. I can imagine how stressful it was, but despite this, the tournament was held. A large team of us went to the Philippines and helped organize it. From experience, I have never seen anything worse than this.
Is it possible to get government support for your business?
Yes, it is possible, but, in my opinion, this is not the best strategy. A business must be self-directed and self-sufficient. Still, state support always means certain obligations, often limiting and inhibiting. It is possible to receive government support because eSports works for young people aged 17-18, and this audience is more important than anyone else for the state. We even made attempts in this direction, but refused because there is too much bureaucracy... In short, this is an incomparable level of effort and results.
Who creates the prize fund? Do tournaments always pay off?
In e-sports, tournaments are organized in a very interesting way, and the same scheme works in classical sports. First, the tournament prize fund is announced, and only then teams are invited. The prize fund is paid, as you know, after the end of the tournament. What does it mean? This means that it is not necessary for a business to have a prize fund at the start of the tournament. This creates opportunities for fraud. Therefore, cases of non-payment of prize money are, unfortunately, not uncommon. It is important to make a commitment and sensibly assess the size of the prize fund.
There are cases when companies first declare a prize fund, hoping to earn the necessary money over time, but they fail. There have been such cases in Russia and around the world. We know this happens and we are very careful about it. Fortunately, everything is fine with us and all prize funds are paid without problems.
What prevents domestic gaming from developing?
The development of e-sports is directly related to the development of the Internet. Accordingly, the better the Internet develops in the CIS and Russia, the better the communications and communications, the faster eSports will develop. This is the first point.
The second point is the solvency of the audience. A company that builds a business in the CIS a priori operates in a market with lower customer solvency than in the European or American markets. The European audience is at least 4 times more solvent than the Russian one, and the American audience is about 20 times more solvent. If companies have access to more money, they have more resources for their own development. Therefore, here we are directly dependent on the economy of the region, and the better the economy in our region, the better business develops. This is the main stopper; CIS companies cannot be self-sufficient here in the CIS region. In any case, for powerful development it is important to enter the Western market.
What project are you working on now?
In 2018, we are planning very close cooperation with the ESL company (this is the largest e-sports holding in the world). He hosts the biggest tournaments, and we have signed a deep cooperation contract with him. At our tournaments we give away tickets to their championships. All tournaments held by ESL have the status of world championships, majors, and today we have created such conditions that teams who want to play in ESL tournaments can get these slots in our tournaments - that is, enter through our qualifications for ESL tournaments. This is the main strategy for next year.
Back this month, together with our friends and partners, we brought our product to market for the first time: Energgum esports gum. This is a chewable energy drink that works like Red Bull. It is created for those for whom it is important to maintain concentration. We also plan to create our own IT product. I won’t reveal the details yet.
You are participating in . What are you planning to talk about?
First of all, about the experience of our partners: how the companies that cooperate with us entered the eSports market, what goals they set for themselves and what results they achieved. I will also tell you how to effectively interact with the esports audience and which products have the highest potential in this market.
How the SportiCo company organizes football and volleyball competitions for large enterprises from different cities
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“If I just wanted to earn money and not do what I love, I would open a beer stall,” says Viktor Bezmaternykh, director of the Barnaul company SportiKo. In 2014, at the very beginning of the crisis, he took the risk of launching a business in Siberia organizing corporate and industry sporting events. Viktor Bezmaternykh talks about how the company attracts Russian football stars to its tournaments and how much corporations have cut sports budgets during the crisis. told portal altapress.ru.
Entrepreneur from Barnaul, company director "SportiKo", which organizes corporate and industry sports competitions in team sports (football, mini-football, volleyball). Education: Altai State Polytechnic University. Married.
“We work like on a swing”
In fact, I found myself forced to start a company. Before that, I worked in exactly the same Moscow company, and headed its Yekaterinburg office. For many reasons, I had to part with the company and return to my homeland - Barnaul. I did not plan to continue working in this area, because I was “fed up” with organizational hassle at my previous job and was thinking, for example, of heading the sales department in some company, because I had such experience.
But at my previous place of work, they didn’t give me my work book for a long time, so I couldn’t get a good position. Then I found a way out by opening my own business. There was no choice in what field to work in: by that time, I was most successful in organizing sports tournaments. This is how “SportiKo” appeared.
In the most general sense, these are services for organizing sporting events. We implement only our own projects that we have a passion for - industry-specific one- and two-day football and volleyball tournaments, mini-football championships in Siberian cities. We try to ensure that they are organized at the highest level. For example, an obligatory item is an invitation to a football star. At our tournaments there were Andrei Kanchelskis, Evgeniy Aldonin, Oleg Romantsev, Georgiy Yartsev - names that are familiar to everyone even superficially interested in football. It costs some money, but it adds prestige to our tournaments.
At the first stage there were not as many difficulties as there are now. We made the first project in November 2014, just when the crisis began in the economy. But it wasn’t felt so strongly yet, and it was easier for us. Then companies first began to cut budgets for corporate needs and sporting events. Figuratively speaking, if previously they spent three rubles on this, now they spend one.
At the same time, we need to develop the already traditional tournaments no matter what. It is important for us to carry them out at least at the same level, and naturally show no worse financial results. We try to always have something new at tournaments, and many of these innovations are illogical from a business point of view - a project may raise 100 thousand rubles less than the previous one, but we invest 20 thousand rubles more in its organization.
Nowadays it happens that we work as if on a seesaw: one project turns out to be profitable, in another we barely make ends meet. But we hope that when the economic situation gets better, we will reap the benefits of what we are currently gaining.
“How did we get started?”
This business requires certain knowledge and investments in the future, when it is necessary to develop, when some projects may not be profitable. And it’s really not expensive to start: “SportiCo” started with a loan of 100 thousand rubles. All that was needed was an office, simple computer equipment and staff. The main costs begin simultaneously with the organization of the event: renting a stadium, paying for the services of presenters, photographers, cheerleaders, inviting a star, purchasing awards, water, and equipment.
When we started making the first tournament, we had zero in our account. We organized it using the contributions we received from the participants. We can say that it was an all-in game, but I did everything with confidence and knowledge of the matter.
We were offering a completely new product, we were a company without a portfolio, in a city that was far away. I can imagine how many suspicions might arise among the people to whom we offered our services. Now sometimes I think: how did we get started?
We have two managers constantly working on projects, and there are people who help us organize events in other cities. Plus, each event involves 20-30 people: presenters, photographers, cheerleaders, paramedics, referees. Now we mostly organize everything remotely, and we arrive at the site directly on the day of the tournament.
Now “SportiKo” holds events in Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Yekaterinburg, and Sochi. And not a single one in the Altai Territory, where the company itself is located. We could hold tournaments in Barnaul, but it would be longer, more difficult and not profitable. We have a good football infrastructure, but transport accessibility and the status of the city do not allow us to hold such tournaments as in Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk.
Which companies today are ready to invest in the sports activities of their employees? The most athletic and the richest are the fuel and energy complex. Builders and IT specialists are also good candidates for participating in tournaments. In Moscow, where the offices of the largest companies are concentrated, pharmacists, doctors, and banks spend a lot on sports. We have teams participating from Chita to Minsk, there were teams from Donetsk and Crimea.
“If you expand, then only by geography”
Now our portfolio consists mainly of football tournaments and one volleyball tournament. Why did volleyball come into being? It is played in many enterprises. This is the number two most popular sport after football. We wanted to diversify the line of tournaments, plus there is a wonderful place in Novosibirsk where you can hold a one-day tournament.
This was the first experience of holding such a tournament. Volleyball has its own characteristics in terms of logistics. We didn’t even expect that everything would go so smoothly. As a result, we received a lot of positive feedback. Now we think that this tournament will become permanent among the fuel and energy complex, despite the fact that it was not the most financially successful.
It was also interesting because completely different people play volleyball. Football players are more creative, and volleyball players are more disciplined and, no offense intended, probably even more cultured.
For now we will limit ourselves to these sports. Right now we don't have much room for maneuver. If we expand, then only in geography. If it weren’t for the crisis, we would have other areas playing, for example, trade and banking, then we could think about new tournaments. Now we are restraining ourselves. If there were teams, we could hold 20 tournaments a year. But in this situation, you need to make sure that the income is generated not by 2-4 projects per year, but by more.
So far we have not had experience in organizing sports competitions for any companies. But we do not set a goal to offer such services.
For now, I don’t want to contact companies with proposals to organize a sports festival for them, but if a request comes in, we’ll take it and do everything at the highest level. Because the principles of organization are the same everywhere - even in hockey, even in cross-country skiing.
What is the average cost for a team to participate in the tournament? It is different everywhere, because we primarily base it on the number of the team, the price of renting the site and other expenses that we incur. On average, participation in a one-day tournament costs 40-45 thousand rubles per team, participation in the championship costs about the same.
Our percentage, as organizers, is about 30-40% of the costs of the tournament. But we must remember that we also have fixed expenses - taxes, salaries, rent.
Regarding profitability: if you see that 10-12 teams are participating in the tournament, then we have not earned anything, if there are 14-16 teams or more, then there is profit.
We have been organizing and holding football tournaments since 2007.
During this time, we organized dozens of competitions, friendly matches, corporate tournaments, including children's and international ones.
Among the football competitions we have held:
- Annual international competitions of the FEC League.
- For children - an annual autumn tournament, the “Football Hopes” and “Sibur for Children!” tournaments.
- For adults – competitions for the Simonyan Cup (the strongest teams of the fuel and energy complex play), for the “Sport-TEK” cup, and a tournament of the Ministry of Energy.
- Regular sports competitions among adult teams.
- Thematic football tournaments dedicated to memorable dates.
- Anniversary competitions among regular participants of the games
- Numerous corporate football tournaments, including away and international.
- Sports football holidays.
Over the past years, dozens of teams have participated in our tournaments, we have held games in Russia and abroad, and awarded hundreds of cups, certificates, memorial signs and souvenirs.
Schedule of upcoming tournaments
You can see the schedule of tournaments planned for this year and apply for your team to participate on this page: .
In addition, we are ready to organize a separate corporate football tournament for you, including an away one, in the capital or abroad.
Why does Sport-TEK organize football tournaments professionally?
Because our general director is a football player who played for the clubs CSKA and Zenit for many years. He knows better than anyone how a sporting event should be organized so that:
- the athletes fully demonstrated their abilities;
- spectators enjoyed spectacular matches and heartily cheered for their favorite team;
- all tournament participants and delegation representatives were satisfied with the trip and stay in the new place and retained pleasant memories;
- the entire event: including judging, awards, opening, closing, gala banquet, went flawlessly and left only good impressions.
We organize football competitions at any level and take care of absolutely all organizational issues.
We believe that the best recognition of our work is the fact that every year more and more new football teams take part in our events, and most of them become regular participants in our tournaments, sports events and competitions.
What will a corporate football tournament give your company?
- Movement. How much time do your employees spend so actively, excitedly and cheerfully? A football tournament is an opportunity to test your strength, perform in a new role and even remember your childhood a little. For all this, your employees will be sincerely grateful to you!
- Teamwork. Do you think that there is no sense of comradeship between employees of the same department? Invite them to stand together to defend the goal, attack opponents on the football field - they themselves will be surprised at how quickly they will be able to cooperate.
- Relationships in the team. Are they cool? A little tight? Don't care if they don't exist? One corporate football tournament - and you will forget about this problem, and relationships in the team will become much warmer.
- Trips. We organize away football tournaments in Russian cities and abroad. We provide charter, excursion services, entertainment programs.
- Reputation. A company that constantly participates in sporting events is a modern, active, development-oriented company. This makes her a very worthy business partner in the eyes of other businessmen and increases her attractiveness in the eyes of potential employees.
Organization of a turnkey football tournament
All you need to do is call and enter your information. We will resolve all other issues - from transfer to organizing refereeing.
We undertake negotiations with the owners of sports complexes, organizing charters, accommodation and meals for athletes and delegations, medical care, entertainment programs, the event itself and its information support.
7 most recent football and corporate tournaments
Attention! You can see photo and video reports about the tournaments held by our company at this
Holding a children's football tournament
Small slideshow
Do you like to play football? Probably, everyone who has kicked a ball in a yard since childhood will answer this question in the affirmative, even if now there is not enough time for this activity. But many continue to meet in the clearing playing their favorite game, abstracting from everyday worries. It would seem – what’s so complicated? I found a clearing, or if I have the means, I rented a hall or a football field. I brought a ball with me, gathered my friends into teams - and a small tournament was ready. Especially if there are more than two teams willing to participate. And so, having assumed the responsibilities of such an organizer, after a couple of meetings the person imagines himself to be a real guru in organizing football tournaments. For a case of beer.
First, let's start by defining what kind of competitions these are, what differences exist. Football tournaments can be organized on a large lawn in the classic 11x11 format. It is possible to develop competition regulations with the rules of mini-football, both on the parquet and on the artificial turf, playing with “four”, 5x5 or 6x6 players. The size of the site is also important. When you have a lot of people interested, and the number of teams exceeds the number of available fields, the field is divided into several areas. The recommended size of the court when the game is played with a 5x5 or 6x6 squad is 30x40 or 40x60 m.
There are long-developed rules by which the game schedule is drawn up. You can find them on the Internet without racking your brains about how to make sure that 27 teams take part in your tournament, which are not at all divided into the 4 sites you rented. It also matters how much time you allocate for the teams to play. Practice shows that in a one-day tournament with a large number of teams, the playing time of athletes rapidly decreases. You will have to play 7 minutes per half. But with this format, you are guaranteed the most positive communication between the gathered people outside the field, when rivals turn into fans and spectators for other teams. For the unity of the company’s team, if we hold a tournament within the same corporation, it has significant significance and brings people together in an informal setting.
Holding mini-football tournaments is one of the most popular areas in corporate sports. There are entire business leagues in which your corporate team can take part. Or, you can find among the many offers from event agencies one that will correspond to your status or corporate interests, or, conversely, agree to participate in a charity tournament in memory of a famous athlete or to help those in need. If you can’t decide how best to structure your work within the framework of a corporate sports program, feel free to contact our Style Project agency, we will develop a program especially for you, thanks to which your team will reach a qualitatively new level, will be able to find opponents for training, or we will create a real football festival for all your employees, just like at world championships.
Special attention, something that should be given enough time and for which you should never skimp on the budget, is professional judging. The rules of the game of football have long been developed and adopted by world football associations, but the human factor will always matter, despite the technical innovations that are used in the world when refereeing football matches. Be sure to hire qualified people to operate your games. To do this, just contact your local football federation and they will advise you of competent specialists.
Almost all people love to receive gifts and surprises. That is why in any competition special attention is paid to award paraphernalia. In addition to purchasing medals, cups, certificates for participants, we can also offer you separate prizes for the best players in the nominations. If funds allow, all these items can be developed according to an individual design with elements of your logo and using corporate colors. Everyone who came to the tournament will forever remember a souvenir in the form of a badge, a small cup or some kind of thing useful for sports. Entrust the development of a turnkey tournament to professionals, and then you won’t have to blush in front of the partners and clients you invited to participate in your football celebration.
You can do:
- spring/summer and autumn/winter;
- One-day tournaments for prizes from the company president;
- Take part in joint football festivals with partners.
- Organize football competitions as part of the Spartakiad.
At a time when every player considers himself a great specialist, coach and professional referee, it is better to entrust the organization and conduct of a football tournament to specialists who will take responsibility for observing all the features in the development of rules and regulations, their compliance with world football rules, and will help in solving such issues as developing a game schedule and calendar grid, developing a script for the award ceremony, working out and producing prizes and souvenirs. Contact Style Project, and your football will be remembered for a long time by all participants!
Danilova Evgeniya
Sports project manager at STYLE PROJECT
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