On Sunday, September 13 at 19:00 Moscow time, CSKA Moscow will host Spartak. Football fans of CSKA and Spartak have nothing to wait for the next meeting of the teams, but fans of esports will not see such a derby soon. Both football clubs have long discovered video games, but have not yet become a full-fledged part of the industry. Cybersport.ru tells how our teams flirted with esports, how European clubs do it and whether it is possible to expect a Moscow derby in the conditional CS: GO in the future.
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Spartak in esports – from FIFA to partnership with forZe
The red and whites began to get acquainted with eSports before CSKA. The first e-sportsman in the ranks of Spartak appeared in September 2016 – following FC Ufa, the Moscow club signed a contract with a professional player in FIFA. His own fan began to play for Spartak Sergey KEFIR Nikiforov… However, the cooperation lasted less than a year.
KEFIR was not useful to Spartak. Photo: FC Spartak official website
Although KEFIR was formally signed as an esportsman, he is still more known precisely as a content maker. His YouTube channel has over 1.15 million subscribers, and his videos get an average of 200-300 thousand views. Leaving Spartak, Nikiforov admitted that he wanted to popularize the club on YouTube, especially since his videos, shot together with the players, collected half a million views, but Spartak for some reason refused.
It was not the football “Spartak” that got better acquainted with e-sports, but the sports society of the same name (yes, the FC is not included in the IFRS). In October 2017, the IFSO “Spartak” announced that it would collect rosters in three disciplines – Dota 2, CS: GO and League of Legends. The Riot Games MOBA team never appeared, and in Valve’s games Spartak stayed only for a few months: the Counter-Strike roster represented the organization from April to September, and in Dota, from September to November.
However, not to say that everything was in vain. Yes, the Dota roster eventually fell apart, but the CS: GO team ended up with a very strong team – forZe…
The history of MFSO “Spartak” in e-sports was fast and chaotic, but not in vain – because football “Spartak” became interested in the CS: GO team. In the fall of 2018, forZe and FC announced a partnership, within the framework of which the identity of the e-sports club became very close to Spartak: the blue color was changed to red, and the Spartak diamond was added to the jersey.
ForZe is quite popular in the CIS. Photo: Epic Esports Events
Of course, the cooperation was not one-sided. This primarily concerns sponsorship: forZe signed an agreement with Lukoil. So the club got a very serious partner, but as it soon turned out, big sponsors sometimes put forward tough conditions – doters will confirm…
Although Spartak and forZe really cooperate closely (the e-sports club even has its own department at the Otkrytie Arena stadium), they are still different companies. And although the club recently presented Kokorin with a video parodying CS: GO, no intentions to take the next real steps in the industry can be seen from him yet. It’s a pity.
CSKA and eSports – neat flirting
If “Spartak” jumped into e-sports with a head, then CSKA is experimenting with it very carefully and precisely. The history of the club in the industry also began with FIFA, since in 2017 the RFPL decided to host the Russian cyber football championship: in February, CSKA CEO Roman Babaev presented Andrey TIMON Guriev as a representative of CSKA at the tournament.
Babaev presents TIMON. Photo: PFC CSKA official website
TIMON eventually won the competition, but didn’t stay at CSKA. Subsequently, he represented the club at another tournament, but this time as a player for Gambit Esports. For some reason, CSKA was clearly not interested in further cooperation with TIMON: now the esports player who supports the army team represents Lokomotiv Esports.
Apparently, CSKA decided not to get involved in e-sports. Instead, the club winks at esports differently – through memes. For example, in 2019, the army team announced the signing of Lucas Santos in an unusual way, making a cut from Papic’s signature phrases (Arthas). The video immediately spread across the Internet – the video on VKontakte already has more than 350 thousand views (despite the fact that on average CSKA videos get about 2 thousand views).
And also a lot of gamers gathered in CSKA. This was first talked about three years ago, when the club’s players Alexander Golovin and Timur Zhamaletdinov celebrated the victory in the Champions League over Benfica with phrases from e-sports – “This is GG” and “Easy skating”. In addition to football simulators, in CSKA, basically everyone plays Counter-Strike – especially Fedor Chalov, Konstantin Kuchaev and Nikita Chernov. The last two, together with Team Spirit and NAVI players, even took part in a show match at the presentation of the Moscow BLAST Pro Series.
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