The Hoodie on Election Day
Macron showed up at the beach on election day in an esports hoodie.
His wife was there. The cameras were there. Nobody planned it — or maybe somebody planned it very carefully, which amounts to the same thing in politics. Either way, Hans Jagnow, the man running club relations at the Esports Foundation, brings it up unprompted when you ask him about heads of state suddenly wanting to be near esports. He says it like it proves something. Maybe it does.
There’s a version of this story where esports spent twenty years knocking on the door, and now the door is just open. Jagnow lived that other version — the generation that had to explain to their parents why they weren’t going outside. He remembers the questions. He tells you that the people who asked those questions are now running things, and the people who grew up after those questions are running other things, and those two groups behave very differently toward a stage in Paris with twenty-five tournaments and thousands of players.
The EWC moved to Paris this year, fast, because geopolitics made Riyadh complicated. Jagnow doesn’t dwell on the stress of it. He says “a couple of weeks” to describe the time they had to relocate an operation of that size to a different country and continent, and then he moves on, the way people move on when the crisis is past and there’s no upside in revisiting it.
What he does dwell on is the word trust. He uses it twice in one breath — the trust from Saudi Arabia, and then the trust from Paris. As if trust is the thing you carry with you when everything else has to be left behind and rebuilt from scratch.
The Club Championship is three years old and already producing its own mythology. Falcons have won it twice. Vitality leads on points right now, with around 400, two tournaments in. All Gamers have sixteen qualified rosters. Last year, Team Liquid collected 3,000 points from three wins — chess, MLBB, EAFC — and that 1,000-point swing per win is the architecture of the whole thing: you can grind your way to respectability, but you have to win something to be considered a winner.
Someone asked Jagnow whether the format is a design flaw, given that a club like Falcons — with around twenty qualified rosters and the infrastructure of a state-backed project — is structurally unlikely to lose to a team that started in someone’s bedroom. He said the answer was consistency. He said the answer was that winning one game is a separate requirement from accumulating points. He said it calmly, which is how people answer questions they’ve already answered several times to themselves.
The bedroom-project question is the one that doesn’t resolve easily. Jagnow says the ecosystem is open. He says last-chance qualifiers exist. He says smaller clubs finish in the top 24 and collect prize money and grow. He believes this. It may also be true. Those two things are not in conflict.
What strikes you, listening to someone explain a $20 million annual stipend paid to 40 partner clubs for “sustainable marketing models beyond just prize money,” is how much of esports in 2026 is really a conversation about what kind of sport it wants to be when it grows up. Whether the clubs that started with a passion and a laptop get to stay in the room with the ones that arrived with investment vehicles.
Jagnow’s answer, essentially, is: yes, and it will just take time.
He’s probably right. He’s also the person whose job it is to believe that.
Macron wore the hoodie. The cameras caught it. Three billion gamers exist somewhere out there, and some fraction of them will find their way to a stage like this. The Foundation is betting on fandom as infrastructure — 300 million fans through club channels, 750 million viewers across the whole tournament — and the gap between those two numbers is the gap between people who follow a team and people who watched something happen once.
Closing that gap is the whole project.
Whether it happens from the top down, or whether a bedroom club makes it all the way and rewrites the story from the inside — that part isn’t decided yet.
Adrian Kovacs