Will Esports Ever Impact Swimming?

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of SwimSwam magazine. Subscribe here.

The video game industry is one of the largest and most prosperous on the global market, and a huge business has been created around the passion of billions of people to live an experience through an avatar.

We’re all waiting to see what impact the metaverse will have in our everyday life. The metaverse is a hypothetical iteration of the internet as a single, universal, and immersive virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets. You could say that video games, first invented in 1958, were the first human approach to the virtual world.

But what do sports have to do with all this? A lot. Amid shooting simulations, role-playing games, magical fights, and trivia games, a category much loved by the public is sports video games. As esports continue to grow in popularity, we’ve even heard more conversations about whether to include esports in the Olympics.

However, the most interesting data is the growing link established between the manufacturers of video games that simulate a specific sport and the leagues and players that play that sport on the field. For example, the Madden video game, released in 1988 by EA Sports, has been one of the best-selling games in the world for more than 20 years and has created a real link with the NFL. The game, named after the legendary player and coach John Madden, has had such an impact on U.S. culture that it has influenced real-life football players and coaches. In 1993 the game acquired the rights to call itself Madden NFL. The consequences are enormous, and the public enthusiastically waits every year to know the player on the cover of the box or the score assigned to each player. The players themselves enjoy discussing the Madden rankings.

The story that links the National Basketball League to the NBA2K video game is very similar. The video game, which arrived in American homes in 1999, was a masterpiece of realism that involved the league, the players, and the franchises with an increasingly important role that tends to blur the lines where the NBA ends and where NBA2K begins.

The ability to use a joystick to stay up-to-date and involved in the sport you love is a perfect way to fill the gap that sports like the NFL and NBA leave for the lazy because each season only lasts a few months per year. But the real turning point for the marketing of these sports, (and we can add soccer for the European market) is the number of new fans who have begun to love physical sports through video games.

Video games, thanks to their tactical and technical aspect, allow the user to become expert and understand mechanisms that they might not notice during a game on TV. Last but not least, the fact that thanks to the global video game market, American leagues such as the NFL and NBA can also keep in touch with audiences from other continents who may never see a live game.

If team sports such as basketball and football are increasing their fanbase thanks to technology, what can individual sports such as swimming that are difficult to transform into virtual competitions do?