He famously won the Premier League in a miracle season with Leicester City, now the Austrian Christian Fuchs is turning his attention to eSports. After initiating his NoFuchsGiven eSports academy, he has his focus set on establishing an eSports arena in New York City. It’s exciting times that show just how close professional football and eSports are connected these days.
Christian Fuchs, a founder or academies
His career as a professional football player has had its highs and lows. Christian Fuchs is still playing for Leicester City in the English Premier League, which he won with his club in 2016.
He used to play in the Bundesliga as well, for Schalke 04 or Mainz 05 and was Austria’s captain for five years. Right now, the 33 year-old isn’t getting a lot of game time in England. But offside the British football pitches, he has made his mark, too. In 2014, Fuchs founded the Fox Soccer Academy, which represents over 200 youth soccer players internationally. It operates in the US, England and Austria and is one of Fuchs’ projects for the development of future sports talent. But it is not his only one.
Christian Fuchs also founded the NoFuchsGiven eSports academy in order to get into the rapidly growing eSports industry. Apparently, he got interested after seeing his son watch various FIFA streams on Twitch. That’s what Steve McCaskill reported on Forbes. The academy now has twelve players from six countries in its ranks. But Fuchs doesn’t seem content just being the founder of an eSports team becoming more and more successful.
The Premier League left back also wants to build an eSports arena in New York City. He shared those plans with the public at the SportsPro Live.
I will build an eSports arena in New York. I just recently purchased a sports complex,
he said.
Fuchs talked about a hotel attached to the arena, whilst the latter shall be holding about a thousand people. He is in talks with partners as he wants to use the complex to generate money with the creation of the eSports ground. But Fuchs is also convinced that this kind of sports is the future and will only lure more and more people to watch the virtual games together locally.
According to Deloitte, eSports will generate 1,3 billion Euro in 2020. And we will already have 454 million interested viewers worldwide in 2019, as of Statista. Some might be occasional viewers, but you can gain views and revenue from them as well.
Find more statistics at Statista
With the number of eSports fans and viewers only rising, it seems that Christian Fuchs has made the right call in building his own eSports arena in New York. For the US is, besides Asia, the biggest gaming and eSports market and Fuchs’ name, written into football folklore forever after being part of that miraculous Leicester City side from 2015/16, will only help his cause in terms of marketing. So, you might get the feeling the Fuchs eSports arena will not be the last of its kind as other current and former football stars could well jump on that powerful eSports train. The phenomenon offers a lot of potential. Sometimes building a place to showcase a wanted thing is just the right move to exploit its opportiunities.