Richard Lewis shares his derailed train of thought with the wider world in his regular column feature, Gonzorreah.

Read Richard's last column "The Big Show "HERE

This column is the sole opinion of the author and does not represent the opinion of Heaven Media Ltd or the opinion of any affiliates.

It’s the latest craze sweeping the CS:S scene… All the organisations out there that are sort of in that mid-tier, scratching at the door labelled “big time” like a cat ravaged by exposure and mange, now have decided that having an “Academy” team is a step forward. They’ve got their valid reasons of course… They’ll tell you about stability, tell you about opportunity and they’ll talk about professionalism, making the world of e-sports sound like something akin to the world of politics with marginally less sleeze and sexual deviancy. The reality is though it’s a way to rope a bunch of e-fame hungry kids, get them entered in a few leagues wearing more tags and sponsors affiliations and have them parade around like walking billboards. It’s a form of cheap marketing that’s as transparent as the smooth triple distilled vodka of Smirnoff.

If you post below saying how much you love their vodka they might send me another case. Drink responsibly.

Yes, they paid me to say that and it illustrates the point well. While the motivations behind why the organisations might be transparent to anyone with half a brain, strangely enough there is a complete lack of transparency when it comes to the organisations explaining exactly what their support entails. More often than not you find players that are prevented from talking publicly about what they receive, yet rarely is it the same sort of support the senior team boasts about. Teams, that solely for the sake of wearing a tag, will pay their own way to events and then pretend that it didn’t really happen… Teams that will come out talking about the great “support” they have received form management, which pretty much amounted to a quick chat on ventrilo once a week and maybe a bit of old hardware they had lying round being winged out in the post. The same teams boring you to death with all the talk about how they fit right in at their new “home” and are being taught the game by their more experienced stablemates, when in reality that team won’t play them because they see it as pointless.

So let’s just come out and tell the truth. We know why the organisations do it and equally it’s obvious why these “academy” teams go for it – the chance to be loosely associated with an organisation they simply aren’t good enough to be associated with unless they’re willing to swallow a pretty shit deal. Still, you’ve got that tag right? And in time people might even forget there was ACADEMY in capital letters after it, so you might be able to blag your way into another organisation that has jumped into the e-sports deep end knowing nothing about the waters and wearing lead lined boots. Good for you.

It’s not like I too haven’t thought that in principle it could be a good idea if perfectly executed… Indeed, way back in 2006 I formed a team that was designed to help the progress of some young talent. The first experiment was something of a failure although it did mean that I can be forever credited as having played a part in the development of Josh “moLe” Rowley. The second time was a little more structured and came in the xciteuk academy team. I plucked some young players who weren’t really known from a public community team and wanted to give them a platform to mingle with some of the better players from the UK scene. It seemed like a good idea and we were all initially happy with it… What followed was many problems and few positives.

The first one related to the name…

“Does it really have to be called an academy team?” the youngsters pleaded. “Could it not be called something else instead.”

The xciteuk community... Seemingly better off without an academy side

They proposed a series of awful names, like “nuschool” and “xciteuk.future” but it all pretty much made me sick. “What’s in a name anyway?” I would often ponder at the start of my e-sports management career. Turns out pretty much everything. The shit people will do for a few letters that appear before an assumed gaming alias bewilders me to this day. In the real world people go all out to have letters after their name, in e-sports before it.

Then came the problem of team interaction. While the senior team were initially loathe to play against I did manage to make them understand it would be, at the very least, a weekly requirement and it would have to involve some basic coaching. While it was a chore, they didn’t mind since as they were getting a free LAN out of it. Yet the first session of games went badly and descended into the usual barrage of insults and cheating accusations that the UK scene is known for, with the only problem being of course that these teams were both going to have to work together, attend LAN together and – for the outsider perspective at least – support each other.

“They’re fucking bellends Rich” one senior player bemoaned, with David “jaFro” Davison calmly explaining to me in his soft Welsh tones the many acts of violence he would bestow upon all five of them. So much for the promise of LAN supervision in a safe environment. At the same time this was going on, the academy team had already decided the reason the games had stopped was because, actually they were better than them. This sudden inflated opinion carried through all their practice games and at all times of day my Steam would light up with links to screenshots and IRC logs of a team that were out of control.

Then came the “N-bomb” incident, which was pretty much the last straw. A team from another organisation I had good ties to showed me a screenshot of one my players being racist in a game and had said they’d not post it anywhere, but I should really have a word with them. In the end I just thought “fuck it” and gave them the boot. Never again would I be tempted to try it and I instead threw the money into supporting a TF2 team, which went and outshone the senior CS:S team anyway by getting a podium finish at i32.

How much learning is really going on within the "academy" set-up?

Of course, you might just think I got unlucky, the wrong blend of personalities. Even if that were true, the way is still fraught with potential grounds for conflict. Firstly, if you support two teams in one game, with one being of a higher standard than the other, the first time you have to explain that the former can’t go to an event they will point to all the resources used in supporting the latter. They’ve probably got a point too. Even if you have a bottomless pit of money – you’re in e-sports so you don’t – there’s the potential situation of them playing each other at an event, which opens you to an embarrassing disaster with long term ramifications (if the academy side win, they will put forward the case that they should be the senior side) or at the very least accusations of “match fixing”.

Where the concept really falls down though is in structure. What really is being achieved? What are the goals? Does anyone know? No-one seems to ever come out and actually say what their “academy” side has been put in place for. Even fewer organisations can explain why they want one at all without it sounding like a hollow but positive retread of what you’ve just read. If the dictionary definition of the word “academy” is “a school or college for special instruction or training in a subject” then who is doing the instructing? How is it being measured? When does it end? Ask anyone enamoured with the whole academy idea questions like these and the eyes roll up into their head and they start drooling, much like most of the British population during the recent royal wedding.

The only thing that has even come close of late was the Team Dignitas Gamer Search that unveiled the UK talent of Samayan 'BlinG' Kay. It had all the trappings of the publicity stunt that it clearly was but on the whole hasn’t turned out too badly, although it’s still purported to be far from a bed of roses and it's debatable how much their new ward will get from it on a long term basis.

Carlos Tevez... Seemingly watching the royal wedding

This being, of course, another potential problem… No-one is ever going to say how successful it is, only how successful it was. At the time no-one is going to do anything as wild as tell the full story, the gritty day to day of “academy” life, the days where little is learned and even less attempted, just treading water wondering what comes next. Far better instead to wait, look at the overall picture and then we can all assess how it all panned out, usually with a few mealy mouthed platitudes along the lines of “I’ll always be grateful to organisation X for giving me a chance”, which sounds about as believable as it does when similar words spill from the malformed mouth of Carlos Tevez.

Yeah, I don’t get it, nor do I get why it has become suddenly so popular, why I am currently seeing teams of players who are in their own right mind-numbingly average and yet they have been supposedly entrusted with the development of people who are worse than average. If you think about the concept of what it is to be “average”, how that is the happy medium that the majority of all people will somehow gravitate to by themselves with little or no guidance, then it really does look like a big fucking waste of time.

Let’s save the gimmickry and the illusion of professionalism for when we can actually afford it and when we have a series of disciplines that make doing so worth while. Until then, these teams would be better off going at it alone. They’d certainly learn a hell of a lot more… After all, that’s what their would be-mentors did.