Esports Nations Cup explains jersey sponsorships, revenue sharing and adidas partnership

A few days after the Esports Foundation unveiled the first national team jersey for the Esports Nations Cup, the organization provided more details on how sponsors could appear on these jerseys. In an interview with a specialized outlet The Esports Radar, Mohammed Al Nimer, Chief Commercial Officer at the Esports Foundation, explained in particular how a revenue share will be implemented, as well as the place brands can have on the jerseys.

Presented with great fanfare on the Champs-Élysées during the Esports World Cup Festival, the French national team jersey, notably showcased through its ambassador Caliste "" Henry-Hennebert in advertising campaigns, is the first of a very long series of jerseys to have been unveiled. The jersey features a special logo created for the occasion, with the national symbol, the rooster, pixelated, as well as adidas, the official apparel partner of the first edition of the ENC, which will take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, next November.

These two logos on the front of the jersey will therefore be the only visible details on the final jerseys, as explained by Mohammed Al Nimer. In the interview, he explained that sponsors on the official jerseys will be strictly limited to the one sleeve, with the other sleeve already occupied by a patch, while the front and back will remain empty of any potential partner brands. The Chief Commercial Officer justified this choice by explaining that “we really wanted to make sure the design is very representative of the countries, and for those jerseys to be really cool jerseys that people would want to wear.”

This space can therefore be sold by the National Team Partner in charge of the national team for a given country, or directly by the Esports Foundation itself, especially since many of these NTPs do not exist. Some of the more than 100 nations qualified for the event only have a single manager handling their operations, rather than a full team. A National Team Partner is a group of people, companies, organizations, or individuals from a country who have decided to handle the communication, management, and more around their national team, in addition to being responsible for appointing a general team manager.

These two possibilities therefore logically affect the revenue shares generated by the sale of these jersey sponsorships. “There is a revenue share, but it depends on who brings the brand. If it’s the Foundation that is leading the sales and doing everything, the revenue share is different than if the national team partner is doing it,” the EF's Chief Commercial Officer explained to The Esports Radar.

These sponsors must also logically comply with the requirements of the organizer and the various publishers of the 16 games that will be featured at the event. “We need to ensure that this is done in a brand-safe way, so the whole ecosystem is growing in a healthy way,” Mohammed Al Nimer explained, noting in particular that “gambling remains strictly regulated or prohibited.”

In addition to being sold on the Esports Nations Cup website, he also confirmed that the jerseys will be available at physical locations: “They will be widely available online and offline. I’ll keep the surprise a little bit, but there are some cool things that we’re preparing.” According to the Foundation's CCO, further announcements are still to come, while his team is working to be “sure that the jerseys are available as much as possible for the people to buy them.”

In addition, he confirmed that the partnership with adidas takes precedence over any existing agreements between local federations and their partners, such as those that exist in South Korea. South Korean sportswear brand GOAL Studio is indeed responsible for the Team Korea of esports jerseys for the Asian Games, and recently shared a collection for the team.