When My Nephew Told Me Football Is Boring: Esports, Gen Z, and the Day I Realized I’m Old
The moment everything changed (or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention)
The other night my seventeen-year-old nephew looked at me the way you look at someone who’s just confessed they don’t know what the internet is. I’d asked him, with the slightly forced enthusiasm of an uncle trying to be cool, if he wanted to watch the match with me. “Which match?” he replied, without looking up from his phone. “The match, you know, the derby.” Silence. Then: “Uncle, football’s a bit slow, isn’t it? I’d rather watch the Valorant tournament.”
Valorant. I had no idea what that was. But the feeling I experienced was familiar: it’s the one that hits you when you realize your cultural certainties – those things you thought were universal, eternal, carved in stone – are actually just yours, and they’re rapidly becoming obsolete.
Esports have overtaken traditional sports among young people. Not in some dystopian future, but right now, while I’m sitting here wondering where I went wrong. In 2025, the global esports audience reached 641 million people, and 43% of them are Gen Z. Kids who, apparently, find it more exciting to watch someone play League of Legends than to see twenty-two people running after a ball.
it’s not just about video games
I need to make a confession here. My first reaction was the classic cultural dinosaur response: “How can they watch someone play video games? It’s ridiculous!” Then I thought about how many hours I’d spent watching people dribble, or throw darts, or play pool. And I realized the problem wasn’t them. It was me.
Gen Z – these kids born between 1997 and 2012, raised with a smartphone in hand before they could even read – aren’t simply choosing different entertainment. They’re redefining what it means to be fans, what community means, what participation means. They don’t just want to watch. They want to be inside the thing, commenting in real-time, influencing what happens, feeling part of something global and immediate.
Twitch, YouTube Gaming, Kick: these aren’t just “channels that broadcast video games”. They’re complete social ecosystems where you can watch the competition, chat with thousands of people simultaneously, vote, message players, create memes, feel connected. Twitch in 2025 still holds 54% of the live streaming market with 5.1 billion hours watched, while YouTube Gaming is growing 25% year-over-year. These are numbers that make many traditional sports look pale.
The speed
Another detail I discovered, which made me feel even more out of sync: esports are fast. I mean, really fast. No dead time, no endless pauses, no incomprehensible replays of the same action seen from seventeen different angles.
Games like Valorant, Counter-Strike, Fortnite, League of Legends are built to maintain constant attention. Continuous action, plot twists, momentum that never stops. And this aligns perfectly with a generation accustomed to consuming content at a speed that seems almost frantic to me, someone who grew up with broadcast TV and mandatory patience.
The Valorant Champions 2025 tournament will be held in France in September. League of Legends, Fortnite and Counter-Strike tournaments fill virtual (and physical) arenas with millions of viewers. The Valorant season began in January 2025 with the Kickoff Tournaments, and for the first time a Masters event was held in Toronto. These are global events with impeccable production and a following that rivals the World Cup.
The phone as stadium
Another thing I understood too late: to watch esports you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to buy tickets, you don’t have to leave home, you don’t even have to turn on the TV. Just a smartphone.
56% of the esports audience watches from mobile devices. In Asia and Latin America, mobile esports tournaments are exploding, making competitive gaming accessible to anyone with a phone and a connection. According to 2025 data, over 640 million people follow esports, and an ever-growing percentage does so while on the move – on public transport, during lunch breaks, anywhere.
Compare that to traditional sports: expensive subscriptions, fixed schedules, away games, tickets. Esports are democratic, immediate, global. And above all, they’re where young people already live: online.
Digital tribes
There’s something that struck me when I started understanding this world: the sense of community. I thought nothing could beat the tribal belonging of a stadium stand, the bond with your city’s team, the shared history with your father and grandfather.
But esports have created something different, and perhaps more powerful for this generation. Online communities – Discord, Reddit, Twitch chat, Twitter – are active 24/7. They’re global. You can be from Sulmona and make friends with someone from Seoul because you both support the same League of Legends team. You can create memes, fan art, highlight videos, and feel like an active part of the culture, not just a passive spectator.
It’s not better or worse than the stadium. It’s different. And for Gen Z, raised in a digital world, it’s more authentic.
Money talks
If there was still any doubt about how serious this phenomenon is, just look at who’s investing. Intel, Nvidia, AMD sponsor tournaments and teams, promoting their GPUs and CPUs through gaming events. Red Bull and Monster are everywhere, from Valorant competitions to festivals like DreamHack, where Red Bull even hosted the Red Bull Home Ground tournament.
In 2025, AMD extended its partnership with Toronto Ultra in the Call of Duty League, while Lamborghini – yes, you read that right, the luxury car manufacturer – made its esports festival debut at DreamHack Dallas with a 300-square-meter booth and immersive driving simulators.
When brands of this caliber invest billions, it means they’ve seen the numbers. And the numbers say the esports audience is young, engaged, and has growing purchasing power. This isn’t a passing fad. It’s a market.
My small epiphany
In the end, after hours spent trying to understand, I did something simple: I sat down next to my nephew and asked him to explain what he was watching. It was a match – yes, it’s still called a “match” – of Valorant. Five versus five, complex tactics, specific roles, a tension that keeps you glued to the screen.
And there, in that moment, I understood. It’s not that Gen Z is wrong. It’s that they’ve simply found their way of experiencing competition, community, belonging. They’re not betraying anything. They’re evolving.
Esports will never completely replace traditional sports, at least not for my generation. But for today’s kids – those who in 2025 represent 43% of the global esports audience, those who spend an average of 32 minutes per session watching streams, those who find a League of Legends final more exciting than El Clásico – esports are simply sports.
And me? I’m still learning. I’ve downloaded Twitch. I follow a couple of streamers. I don’t understand everything, but I’m trying. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years it’s this: when an entire generation tells you something is important, maybe it’s worth listening. Even if at first it seems absurd. Even if it makes you feel old.
Especially if it makes you feel old.
