Esports belongs in the sports pages

The argument about whether esports is “really” sport has been running long enough to become boring. It is also the wrong argument, and it has crowded out the far more interesting questions.

The definitional debate is a dead end

Sport has never had a definition that cleanly includes shooting, dressage, darts, snooker and chess-boxing while excluding competitive gaming.

Anyone insisting on a physical-exertion threshold has to explain motorsport, and they never do. Anyone insisting on physical skill has to explain that a professional player executes precise inputs under severe time pressure for hours. Anyone insisting on tradition has to explain that every sport was new once, and that the same objection was raised about basketball.

The definitional line always ends up drawn exactly where it needs to be drawn to exclude the thing the speaker already disliked. That is a tell.

What actually matters to a reader

Structured competition. Ranked teams. Seasons, transfers, tactics, rivalries and stakes. A draft phase that decides matches before a shot is fired. Rosters that fall apart under pressure and rebuild. Young players who arrive from nowhere and veterans who cannot adapt to a patch.

Esports has every one of these, and they produce exactly the kind of coverage a sports section exists to publish: who is good, why they are good, what they changed, and what happens next.

The practical case

A large and young Indian audience follows this closely and is served almost entirely by highlight clips and results posts.

There is an obvious, unfilled gap for people who explain the competition properly — the economy in a shooter, why a roster change worked, what a patch did to a season, how a leaderboard actually functions. Nobody is doing it well at scale in India.

That is a reason to cover it, not a favour being done to it. A sports section that ignores a growing competitive discipline with a young domestic audience is making a commercial error as well as an editorial one.

The one honest objection

There is a real one, and it deserves acknowledging rather than dismissing.

Esports titles are owned by companies, who can change the rules, alter the balance, or discontinue the game entirely. Football is not owned by anyone in that sense; nobody can patch the offside rule out of existence overnight or shut the sport down because it stopped being profitable.

That is a genuine structural fragility. A competitive scene built on a product can vanish with the product, and several have. It is worth writing about, and it is a real difference from traditional sport.

It is not, however, an argument that the competition happening right now is not competition. It is an argument about durability, which is a different claim.

The generational tell

The clearest evidence that this debate is about audience rather than definition: almost nobody under twenty-five participates in it. They are not arguing about whether esports is sport, because the question does not occur to them.

Debates that only one generation is having are usually not really about their stated subject. This one will resolve the way such debates always resolve — not through anyone being persuaded, but through the people holding the objection ceasing to be the people making editorial decisions.

This is an opinion piece and reflects the view of the author.