Ever since competitive video gaming got its portmanteau, there’s been discussion (and derision) over whether having “sports” in the word “esports” makes it so. Detractors argue that sitting in a chair and competing over a keyboard doesn’t meet their arbitrary physical threshold, while defenders say that’s a moot point if your heart rate is still going wild.
Is it a meaningful debate? Not particularly, unless, of course, you want to integrate head-to-head gaming into national sport law, especially when players are doing it not for ranked points, but professional wages or even as a tax-deductible hobby.
More countries are taking the plunge and officially recognizing esports as a sport. The majority can be found in Asia, most notably Indonesia and the Philippines. In other continents, recent members of this club include Greece and Colombia. In Türkiye and Russia, it’s been the law of the land for some time already. But putting aside some isolated licensing incidents, the impact of making esports a sanctioned sport has never been fully tested. This raises questionmarks around national governance, player eligibility, and competitive integrity.
Microtransactional Athletes
Sport, as we generally think of it, is akin to a public good. Governments at various levels are compelled to encourage, fund, and regulate it in careful measure. More often, these responsibilities are designated to the sport’s respective national governing body (NGB)—usually a federation. Contrast this with any popular esports game title* where the aim is to retain players for as long as possible, get them to spend money, or, ideally, both.
This inescapable fact is why esports are often regarded as merely marketing to game companies, though I think it’s more accurate to describe it as a publishing effort (even when the publisher is not an active participant).
*For the sake of this article, we are talking about live-service multiplayer games, which the vast majority of modern esports titles are.
What gives esports a dynamic without parallel in sport is the fact that the games, as commercial products, are built on intellectual property (IP) and licensing mechanisms. This is often analogized as if FIFA owned the game of soccer, including the ball, but that analogy only goes so far. You can throw some clothes on the ground, grab a ball, and play a version of soccer with the same general objective as the pro game, just with your own, simplified backyard rules. Doing this with most major esports titles is no easy task, even if you’re willing to homebrew a version without recognizable trademarks, characters, etc.
With all this in mind, how do you apply something as rigid and barely changing as sports law to esports? With difficulty and a lot of uncertainty.
Square Pegs and Round Holes
In each country, a sport’s NGB oversees rules, competition policies, standards for events and equipment, and the official sanctioning of recognized events. Sports law, of course, differs wildly from country to country. Some (e.g., Italy and Brazil) go as far as to designate sport a constitutional right, overseeing commercial leagues and managing national media rights. There’s the “Nordic model,” where the state is hands off, but outlines clear rules for grassroots funding. The U.S. is one of the biggest outliers, with the federal and state governments hardly regulating any individual sport, only specific aspects such as college play or sports betting.
Let’s break some of these down and see how esports works within this framework.
- Sports Governance: To change a single global rule of a sport, you must fight for votes in arduous committees (recall how long it took to implement VAR in soccer). For video games like League of Legends or Overwatch, this happens every other week. These changes can happen for the sake of competitive integrity, but are largely for player experience and commercial reasons first and foremost.
- Competition Rules: Esports tournament rules are more analogous to sports. However, these only gain any kind of official status by the publisher, effectively eliminating the idea of a national rulebook for any individual esport (unless an NGB wants to catch the Sauron-like eyes of the IP holder…). Not to mention, some publishers have developed their own global codes of conduct, as has the Esports Integrity Commission (ESIC) for its member tournament organizers.
- Equipment and Facility Standards: This is a key role for NGBs, but it is difficult to apply to video game competitions. Correct me if I’m wrong, but is there another sport where one can compete nationally from their home office? We cannot ignore the fact that games are played on commercially owned servers, which rely on the game company’s own internet service provider (ISP) or even deep-sea cables.
- Licenses and Accreditation: Sports laws place heavy emphasis on certification, often for good reason. Most professional gamers, however, would be baffled at requiring a license to compete (given they’ve already agreed to Terms of Service and participation agreements), especially when these licenses are tied to health checks and anti-doping obligations. In most territories, tournament organizers only need standard event permits, while in countries with an esports NGB, we’ve seen game companies apologize for running competitions without their blessing.
Some of the above measures would be welcome in a still disjointed esports environment, but would also create a two-tier system, conflicting individual national standards against those of a publisher or tournament organizer. We’ve seen this play out in Olympic-sanctioned competitions a few times. The most recent example was when a Thai Arena of Valor player was given a lifetime ban (and later arrested on fraud charges) for screen sharing another player’s performance as their own during the 2025 Southeast Asian Games, and when the 2023 Singaporean VALORANT team exploited a game bug.
Also worth keeping in mind: esports is not a single activity. You could compare esports as a category to athletics or motorsport, where each game is considered its own discipline, but this ignores the cavalcade of genres, systems, and peripherals that ultimately result in a categorization nightmare. This has been evident by the fact that the 2026 Asian Games will feature four separate MOBA titles (three on mobile…), since all are to some degree popular around the continent, and none want to be shafted.
The Current Esports Government Policy Landscape
The sports laws of many countries are predicated on the idea that national sports federations must be members of their global governing body. There are multiple international organizations in esports vying for this crown, but to be clear, none have any power over professional leagues or tournaments, just beyond their own competitions. Only those few national federations that have legal power over esports on their soil.
Without pointing fingers, some of the countries that have recognized esports have done so with a heavy hand, leading game companies to opt out of running official leagues in the territory or forcing tournament organizers to move previously scheduled events elsewhere. Other NGBs theoretically have legal power to control all esports in their territory, but wanting to maintain the status quo, opt for handshake deals with industry stakeholders instead.
Meanwhile, other countries have adopted laws around esports in a separate context from sport. Most prominent is France, with laws lightly governing events, player contracts, and VAT rates, with another French bill that could codify esports player visas, introduce new measures for event security, and legalize cash prize online competitions. This year, Germany recognized non-profit esports activities after many years of campaigning, effectively treating them as sports from a tax perspective.
It’s admittedly a grand ask for a government to set esports up with its own legislative bucket, given that the industry’s hype still vastly exceeds its money-making potential. It must be pointed out that the German gemeinnützigkeit (non-profit status) example relies heavily on the games not depicting violent content. This has been a sticking point around the world for politicians looking to benefit from esports’ youth engagement, without causing moral outrage, complicated further by current conversations around screen time
Sports classification can raise esports to a culturally significant status, which is particularly helpful for securing visas or lowering event costs. But the reality can’t be ignored: esports as a whole is almost entirely top-down and commercially driven. Not only is the actual “sport” a product, but none of the prominent pro leagues or tournaments are state-affiliated. The arrival of the Esports Nations Cup now presents something largely unseen in sanctioned sports: a highly funded national team tournament that has no affiliation with the broader sports technocracy.
The newly christened Esports Foundation made the deliberate decision to allow any entity to hoist its country’s flag. In some cases, this will legally have to be a recognized national esports federation, but for others, it can just be a content creator with enough clout and know-how. This partly relates to the Foundation’s highly publicized split from the International Olympic Committee (a bigger topic for another time), but it’s the unprecedented sign-off from game IP holders that could have greater implications for how esports is approached by sports ministries the world over.