Worst Esports Event Of 2024

Oh you thought it was that one? Well you obviously didn't hear about this one...

Previous Winners

🥇 2010: Gamersject

🥇 2011: ESWC

🥇 2012: Northcon

🥇 2013: HoN World Tour Finals

🥇 2014: ESWC

🥇 2015: Gaming Paradise

🥇 2016: Shanghai Major / Nanyang Cruise Cup

🥇2023: CSGO RMRs

And The Winner Is…

🥇2024: Global Esports Tour Rio

Look, the original plan was to give the award to the Skyesports Championship in Mumbai. It met all the classic criteria… Delays, terrible set-ups, dubious admin decisions, teams dropping out, powercuts, dysentery… Yet I knew this would be the wrong thing to do if for no other reason than The Score Esports, who couldn’t be right even in a universe that had outlawed the concept of “left,” declared it might be the worst event EVER. No, no, no my reactionary delusional friends. Not even close but I wouldn’t expect tourists to know that. In the end there could be only one choice for the worst event of the year, and it had to be the Global Esports Tour in Rio. After all, how many esports tournaments have you heard of that have prompted government investigations in the aftermath?

GET Rio 2024 was a real esports throwback in many senses (photo courtesy GET)

We can start simply with the name of the tournament. It’s global in the way that baseball has a World Series…It is clearly a Brazilian project, ran by the Brazilian Confederation of Games and Esports (CBGE) designed to capitalise on esports as a means for providing bread, circuses and occasionally employment for the local population. The concept of the tournament being “global” was also heavily challenged by the attendees, with fifty percent of the teams being Brazilian and the other nations being represented on an organisational level being Argentina, Sweden, Ukraine and whatever nation is desperate enough to claim OG.

As with all winners of this illustrious award the event got off to a delayed start but the reason for the delay was unique. Simply put, the stage was not built. Construction had begun on the 15^th of April and was scheduled to be finished two days later but the workers were lagging behind schedule. This prompted an overnight scramble to get the stage ready in time for the gates opening that was not achieved meaning the tournament was off to a two-hour delay before a fan set foot in the Maracanãzinho.

Despite day one being mostly single map matches the delays piled up with one of the most eagerly anticipated matches of the day, MiBR vs OG, leading to one of the longest. The reason might just be one of the most hilariously inept I’ve heard of in two decades covering this shit. Cutting it short the venue couldn’t get the printer working so the teams could print out their tactical notes. As it got later and later the tournament organisers had to admit defeat and they postponed the remaining day one matches until the following day, creating a domino effect of delays that would haunt the rest of the event. On the plus side though, this didn’t really affect too many people. The first day’s attendance was pitiful, vast swathes of the stadium unoccupied. I’ve had more people in my jacuzzi.

The OG social media team remains the most proficient in the organisation

Then came the lack of practice rooms. Only four had been allocated for an eight-team tournament but as anyone who knows anything about modern esports events the practice rooms very quickly become de facto offices for the organisations as they attend. After all, there needs to be a place to coordinate other aspects of the business and many of these organisations have multiple teams attending other events that might require input and management. For MiBR they had expected to use the practice room for the women’s team to play their ESL Impact match in the day but an overlap with Furia wanting to prepare for their match meant the women had to forfeit against one of the teams at the bottom of their league, Genki.

Indeed, qualifiers for the Esports World Cup were overlapping with the event and given the huge prize pools associated with that event none of the teams were going to forfeit those matches. When an EWC match between MiBR and Pain (https://www.hltv.org/matches/2371625/mibr-vs-pain-esports-world-cup-2024-south-america-closed-qualifier), both still in the GET tournament, had to get played as well, this meant that the Imperial vs Pain match, originally scheduled to be played at 5.30pm was now on course to be played at 2am. This didn’t work for Imperial as they had a flight to Europe booked for the evening that day and had they won they’d still have to fit the grand final in somewhere. The management of Imperial said then that they would have to take a forfeit win if Pain weren’t present on time, a standard rule in esports tournaments for many years. For context, missing the flight to Europe would have meant Imperial being removed from that season’s ESL Pro League.

In the end the match went ahead in the small hours anyway and in the worst outcome for Imperial served up three dull maps with them winning and now having a seemingly impossible final to play. The game was barely worth mentioning at all besides the insane circumstances, but drama was served up courtesy of the world-famous Brazilian fans. A group of Imperial supporters started to flip-off the family of Pain player Marcelo "nyezin" Ramos. The father reacted and moved towards the fans prompting an intervention by security only to get mugged off more by the same group of fans after Pain lost. The end of day two saw residents making noise complaints to local police as the fans spilled out of the venue way after the designated time.

Pain raise a trophy soon to disappear in front of dozens of adoring fans (photo courtesy GET)

Fortunately for Imperial overnight they reached an agreement with ESL to be allowed to meet both their obligations and arrive with a delay meaning that GET avoided the indignity of having to cancel their grand final. In the end Imperial had to run it back against Pain and after everything they’d gone through just to be there, they ended up losing. For the men’s tournament though there would be one more final component to the grand farce and that would be the trophy was missing. You see, the plan had been to take a photo of the trophy being handed to the tournament winners at the Christ the Redeemer statue and so it was promptly taken away from Pain after they raised it on the stage. It’s not clear if they’ve been given it back yet or not.

What makes this event a truly spectacular fuck up is that you’re getting a twofer. A women’s competition was also meant to take place amidst all this chaos, namely the Copa Rio. A simple four team event that was meant to be knocked out on the Sunday after the men’s tournament was concluded was delayed due to suppliers striking until they were paid. CBGE had to pay them off but insisted the women’s tournament wasn’t their responsibility it having been conceived by the Rio de Janeiro State Electronic Sports Federation. As such there was a chance of total cancellation, something exacerbated by the fact that everyone was supposed to vacate the stadium by 6.30pm local time. It took representatives from both federations to entice the management of the stadium to allow them to remain and complete the event with the final ending some time after 11pm.

A glorious shitshow then but one that won’t just be forgotten about. The fact that the event was given approximately $750,000 from the Brazilian state meant that these mistakes were certainly going to have to be accounted for. After a month-long investigation, the CBGE had failed to meet a deadline to answer all questions about the staggering failures of the event and were given a seven day extension under pain of punishment. That didn’t see completion though because only two days after that was reported the Public Prosecutors Office of Rio de Janeiro began a corruption investigation, one which could see criminal charges brought against the CBGE.

In short the whole episode was a sad chapter for Brazilian esports and one that wasn’t really paid too much attention to outside of that region. It’s demonstrative of a lot of issues that are going to become commonplace as esports continues to expand into new territories and does so while taking government money. Unlike the venture capital you are free to piss up against a wall governments have a tendency to want to know where it went. Food for thought given the wider trend of esports becoming a governmental plaything and also another reason for why we simply shouldn’t do events in Rio.

If We Must Come To Brazil Does It Have To Be Rio?

Credit must be given to Dust2.br’s excellent reporting of these events courtesy of their staff writer Gabriel Pumpa. I strongly recommend if you have more interest in the details of this event you read his thorough telling of the story at their website.