Posted by ON June 1, 2026 in Esports
Every time I tell someone I teach esports, I get one of two responses.
The first is genuine interest. The second, from educators who should know better, is a slight pause, then: “Oh, so you run the gaming club?”
No. I teach esports. There is a difference, and it matters enormously.
What Esports Actually Is
Esports is a multi-billion pound global industry with a sophisticated production infrastructure, professional leagues, broadcast partnerships, sponsorship ecosystems, specialist coaching, dedicated analytics, and career pathways that extend far beyond playing games. The players are the athletes. Behind them is an entire industry: broadcasters, directors, commentators, analysts, coaches, event managers, brand managers, social media teams, venue designers, hardware manufacturers, and more.
When I teach esports, I’m not teaching students to play better. I’m teaching them to understand how a live entertainment broadcast is produced. How a team prepares strategically for a high-pressure tournament. How performance data is captured, analysed, and used to make coaching decisions. How sponsorship and commercial deals work in a professional sports context.
These are transferable, real, assessed skills. Not a hobby.
The Curriculum Case
The case for esports as a curriculum subject is not that games are cool or that students enjoy them. It’s that the production skills, analytical thinking, team dynamics, and media literacy involved in serious esports are directly applicable to the creative and digital economy.
A student who has run a school esports broadcast, directing cameras, managing live graphics, commentating, producing a post-match show, has done something more technically demanding than most journalism students do in their first year of a university course. They have produced live content under pressure with real consequences. That is a significant thing.
A student who has analysed match data from a tournament performance, identified patterns in opponent tendencies, and produced a structured coaching debrief has done something directly analogous to sports science at undergraduate level. They’ve applied data to performance in a time-constrained, emotionally loaded context. That is a significant thing.
The problem is not whether these skills are valuable. The problem is whether schools recognise them as education.
What I Actually Teach
In my esports units, students encounter:
Production and broadcast. Students learn the principles of live multi-camera production: cutting between angles, managing lower thirds and graphics, integrating commentary with gameplay footage. They work with real software. They produce outputs that I would not be embarrassed to broadcast.
Strategic analysis. Students study competitive play as a data problem. They learn to identify patterns, interpret team compositions, and produce analysis documents that would be recognisable to any professional coaching staff.
Team performance and psychology. Students explore how high-performing teams communicate under pressure, how tilt affects performance, how to give and receive constructive feedback in a fast-moving competitive environment. This is applied sports psychology. In a different course, you’d call it leadership development.
Industry literacy. Students understand the esports business model, how teams generate revenue, how broadcasts are sold, how the ecosystem differs from traditional sport. This is business and economics taught through a lens students actually engage with.
The Curriculum for Wales Connection
Wales is in a unique position here. The Curriculum for Wales framework explicitly foregrounds cross-curricular competencies, digital skills, and industry-relevant learning. Esports, delivered seriously, sits squarely within this. It develops digital literacy. It develops communication skills. It develops critical thinking and analytical reasoning. It supports wellbeing conversations about screen time, performance pressure, and identity.
The qualifications exist. The framework supports it. What’s missing, in most schools, is the will to treat it as real.
What Needs to Happen
I am not arguing that every school needs an esports team. I am arguing that any school that offers esports only as a club activity and not as curriculum-aligned learning is leaving educational value on the table.
The students who go through a properly designed esports curriculum, with assessed units, real production experience, and structured analytical thinking, are better prepared for the creative and digital workforce than many students who take more traditional qualifications.
That is not an opinion. It is a direct observation from my classroom.
The gaming club is fine. The curriculum subject is better. It’s time we stopped confusing them.