Meet the Man Who Went From Gamer to Esports CEO

It’s seven weeks into this year’s Esports World Cup, the world’s biggest international video game competition, but CEO Ralf Reichert doesn’t appear tired at all. Sipping a cappuccino inside the VIP embassy of Paris’ Expo Porte de Versailles, the former pro gamer-turned-entrepreneur is entirely at ease. After all, he’s not one of the over two thousand people competing. Those days are long behind him.

“We would pack a car and bring our own computers and the big CRT monitors,” Reichert tells Rolling Stone. “There was a tournament here in Paris called LAN Arena. It was in 1999 and 2000; we rented a bus, packed it, and came here with a whole team of six people and spent the weekend. I think we won both times, actually.”

Today, it’s all very different. Reichert has traded in his keyboard and mouse for a coveted gig as the head of one of the largest video game organizations on the planet with the Esports Foundation. In the quiet lull of a midday break between tournament play, he’s able to unwind and bask in the entirety of all he’s accomplished in his quarter century in esports. What once was an underground group of hobbyists pursuing their passion has now become a global spectacle, with players competing across 24 games for a prize pool of $75 million.

The third iteration of the annual summer event was originally set to be hosted in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, like its predecessors, but geopolitical circumstances required a shift, leaving Reichert and his team with a pivot to Paris in just over eight weeks. The Herculean undertaking of the international swap is impressive enough, before ever factoring in that the Paris venue itself needed to be a perpetually shifting mosaic; with the entire show floor turning over weekly as new tournaments and activations traded in.

But Reichert is no stranger to manning the helm of a ship in unsteady waters. A pioneer of professional gaming before the concept was ever a viable job, he co-founded SK Gaming with his brothers, Benjamin and Tim, back when the internet was just in its infancy. What began as a personal competition between his siblings would eventually lead to an unconventional and boundary-shattering career.

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A hobbyist turned entrepreneur

Raised in Oberhausen, Germany, Reichert’s passion for gaming started early. Like many, his early years were predicated on an insatiable need to best his siblings. “I have two brothers; we competed in everything,” he says. “Football was our main turf, but [it was] everything you can think of, as well as video games. I had my first console at the age of six, and we would compete in Pong. They were on that journey with me, and it was as much digital as physical from the very start.”

The trio of brothers were always looking to supplant one another in a variety of games, but it was one in particular title that landed its hooks: 1996’s Quake, one of the first 3D shooters, designed specifically for multiplayer competition.

“1996 to 1997 was special because the internet came at scale, and Quake was the first true 3D shooter, which they even built for online play — or they did in Quake World, an online version for it,” Reichert recalls. “There were different ingredients before, games which you could compete in, which had some complexity. But Quake brought it together to the next level in the first 3D world, and it had tens of thousands of people online competing to build a scene, to build a community.”

The advent of internet-enabled play accelerated the ways in which communities could build around any one game — something Reichert was drawn to. With Quake, his brothers and he had found a larger family of like-minded individuals to play with, rapidly forming the sort of community previous games would take years to amass.

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“You usually need a connect point and, historically, that connection point had been physical events in traditional sports. It was either super local or it took decades to build, and the internet was taking away a lot of these barriers. There were competitions around Space Invaders, but they never got to scale because they had barriers to promotion,” Reichert says. “In Quake, it was probably the first time in history where these barriers were gone, where this was purely built on the internet, broadcasted on the internet, reported on through the internet. It was very niche, right? It was only people with access to the internet in 1996 or 1997 who could feel and see this, so it was by no means mainstream. But it created a sport.”

What started as a familial challenge suddenly became a team effort against external forces. But in the Wild West of online gaming, there wasn’t any true structure. To cement themselves as a team, the Reichert brothers had to build their own website, which served as a business card, and travel in person to LAN (local area network) events to play. But they progressed quickly. By the end of 1997, they were among the best German clubs, but it took a larger congregation for their parents to truly understand the scope of their personal hobby.

“For TGI [True Gamers Invitation], it was the first time my parents traveled with us and watched,” he says. “And my brother ended up in second place, very unlucky. But the takeaway from that was, when we traveled home, they basically said, ‘Look, we’ve been with you on football for our whole life, now we’ve seen this. It’s the same. If we could understand that game, if we had grown up with it, we would watch this as much as we watch you play football.’”

Defying stigma and getting a parent’s blessing as a professional gamer was a huge deal in the Nineties — and still is today — but it was really just the first hurdle for Reichert. In the years to follow, SK Gaming would become the best team in Germany, then Europe, then among the upper echelon of the world. But the esports industry was still inherently grassroots — lacking any kind of larger organization or reverence.

“There was no recognition. There was no structure [or infrastructure],” he says. “There was no monetization. There were no institutions. There was no social acceptance for it. But the ingredients were there.”

Those ingredients coalesced in 2000, when Reichert was approached about creating the ESL (Electronic Sports League), one of the world’s largest esports tournament organizers. While his brothers went on to pursue football — the more obviously lucrative path at the time — Ralf had found an opportunity to bring a different dream to fruition: pro gaming as a career was suddenly a reality. And not just for himself, but for an entire generation of players ahead.

The genesis of competitive online gaming

Without an infrastructure or guide to follow, the early days of ESL were the Wild West for Reichert. It began with pulling together clubs in specific regions, then internationally, but merely hosting competitions wasn’t enough. It wasn’t a given that building an esports ecosystem would automatically draw an audience. The impetus, especially early on, was to create a following beyond the folks who wanted to compete themselves. They knew people wanted to play, but who wanted to watch?

“Everything we set up was to focus on the players and the fans,” Reichert says. “We wanted to have the players take stages and be the center of this, and the fans to be able to follow this like any other sport, because back in the day it was more a participatory thing; the viewership angle was a side effect, but not the core. What ESL brought was an unwavering focus on making this a spectator sport.”

Reichert made attempts to promote esports the traditional way — dabbling with terrestrial broadcast and the burgeoning scene of internet hosting in the 2000s, but it was ultimately too costly. Online advertising and garnering traffic wasn’t a plug-and-play scenario 20 years ago. But by 2011, platforms like Twitch and YouTube suddenly leveled the playing field. But, even on an industry level, there were issues.

“We tried to get the publishers, the game developers, to invest in this — which was really hard because their business model was, ‘We create a $60 boxed game, sell it for four weeks, and then it’s onto the next one,” he explains.

Reichert points toward companies like Blizzard (of Overwatch fame) and Valve (Counter-Strike) as some of the first to see the extended promotional runway afforded by esports and took steps to recalibrate their business models. 

“The first successes were 50 people, then 100, then 500, 1,000, 2,000 — then we went to trade fairs and it was 10,000! The goal was to create this as a life experience at scale, and then to internationalize it,” Reichert says. “We went to other countries and did international tournaments, and then did it across different games, not just Counter-Strike or Quake. Then we brought policymakers and parents and all the critics into the sport to show them. And then [it was] to bring in sponsors to help finance it. All of these things together helped build the industry, and there were different milestones.”

On top of organizing the actual events, promotion was also key. At the time, in 2000, amplification meant working with traditional media — TV, newspapers, magazines — but nothing was guaranteed. ESL even purchased their own television studio for broadcast, but it was never the right fit. It was only on the internet where esports could find an endemic audience.

“It was almost a race against time if you think about it,” Reichert laments. “At the very beginning, it wasn’t clear that traditional media would go away. The internet would substitute for a lot of traditional media, but that was not a proven model. Back in 2000, the amplification was in newspapers, magazines, and TV. To popularize your sport, to make these players stars, to raise the value of the sport, these were your go-to guys, and the value of media on the internet was deemed very low, especially during the 2000 bubble. Now, 20 years later, it’s flipped. But, over time, it became clear that the prime media for this was the internet, because that’s where the games originate. That’s where we play.”

There was also the issue of how esports would be presented to the public, not just as an idea, but as something to invest in. Was it a league? A tournament? It wasn’t the same as hard launching a single sport to the masses; it was an entirely new idea of what all sports could be.

“In 2000, we founded it. We had online leagues, we had tournaments. We tried to build an infrastructure, and we tried to map this out after the football ecosystem,” Reichert explains. “But we learned pretty quickly that leagues are an imperfect model because they don’t have the flexibility you need in such a fast-emerging sport. They’re static. If you look at the matches of a league, they usually create a lot of irrelevant matches — [or rather] non-deciding matches.”

Reichert calls this his “innovator’s dilemma” — if leagues are the way sports are already established, it should make sense to follow the formula. But by 2004, they had pivoted to focus on tournaments. By the dawn of streaming and social media acceptance, it was much easier to organize a following.

“Oftentimes, we say we were 10 years too early,” he says

If 2010 was the catalyst for esports, each subsequent year only multiplied the potential. In 2013, 8,000 people showed up in person to a Counter-Strike tournament in Katowice, Poland. Yet, people remained skeptical — that is, until they set foot in an arena. From there, the question wasn’t whether this could be a real sport, but rather how much bigger could it possibly become.

Through 2016, the rapid development of esports drew the attention of publishers, all of whom wanted their own piece of the pie, leading to a cavalcade of competing franchise leagues pegged to individual games — and, in turn, another bubble. Then, came the pandemic, a situation that esports was ironically more equipped to navigate than most other industries.

“The whole industry grew, grew, grew, and then Covid came, and it actually exploded. It was another accelerator,” Reichert explains. “I’ve had this funny discussion with people where they say, ‘Covid’s really hard, it took a toll on us.’ I say, ‘We’ve been training for 25 years to do this.’ As far back as 1996, we learned you can communicate online, even without video and audio. We could recruit players, run the company and club online without even speaking physically.”

The future of global esports

After establishing esports’ legitimacy through the phenomenon of ESL, which was sold to the Savvy Gaming Group in 2022 for over $1 billion, Reichert moved on to an even bigger endeavor as the CEO of the Esports Foundation — a singular organization designed to bring the world’s greatest players, Clubs and games together under one roof. Not predicated on any single game, it’s instead a wide-reaching tournament, encompassing everything from League of Legends to chess, drawing in 2,000 competitors from over 100 countries in 2026 alone. If ESL laid the groundwork for esports’ global expansion, the Esports World Cup is its next chapter, and a colossal leap forward for developing the institutions the industry deserves.

To see the Esports World Cup is to experience gaming at its most maximalist. For two years in Riyadh, it took over the city entirely. This year’s Parisian edition was no different, selling 175,000 competitive event tickets to bring fans from across the world into one of Europe’s oldest cities for one of its newest colosseum-esque delights. 

On the final day of the seven-week tournament, Paris’ Accor Arena hosted a 20,000-person Counter-Strike event, a massive punctuation mark on the biggest gaming event of all time. The arena roared as the Serbian-based Team Spirit upset the Turkish FUT Esports for the win. Glowed by laserlight and a fireworks display, it was exhilarating. But it was only a smaller part of the puzzle.

The evening was the culmination of everything Reichert had worked toward. There have been many seminal Counter-Strike events across the globe, but this particular one is part of a larger amalgamation of esports as a uniting force internationally.

“The core feeling is community. You go to a place where hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people come for the same reason, for the same purpose, for the same passion — which back at that time was an underground thing,” Reichert says. “You feel like a pioneer, and you do something that you love, and you meet a lot of people who share that same passion. It was a sense of joint belonging, joint purpose, joint interest, and was that sense of building something which will be meaningful and will enable future generations to do this for a living.”

Despite having brought pro gaming from the rec room to the global stage, Reichert has even greater ambitions. Next year, the Esports Nations Cup is set to launch, bringing a different spin on the existing club model. The Esports World Cup takes its selection of clubs seriously — winners’ trophies are literally molded from the goop of losers’ brands — but pivoting to a flag-waving model aims to drive an even deeper connection.

“We have 3.6 billion gamers in the world, roughly 40 percent of the world’s population, and that’s what we see as the target group for the Esports World Cup. The club ecosystem is where esports was built. For us to launch with that makes perfect sense, growing the existing ecosystem and bringing it together,” Reichert says. 

“But then, if you look at any traditional sport, national teams play a huge role. If you look at football, the World Cup, a national team is first-and-foremost a club representing a country,” he continues. “So, in the Esports Nations Cup, more than 150 nations participated in qualification. There’s 150 nations which have a clear club to identify with and rally behind. If you give each country a club to rally behind, you engage a much larger part of the world’s population. You [also] actually give governments a way to engage with this, which was really hard before, because esports was so borderless.”

Beyond support, there’s a very real aspect to how a national cup can benefit individual countries. Rather than any one person being tied to a team, there’s a real opportunity to bring awareness and prestige to a country based on an individual’s performance.

“To create access is such a big thing, and the Esports Nations Cup makes it very inclusive from the start, to have a lot of country diversity and really engage the world — giving these countries something to rally behind,” Reichert says. “The men’s [FIFA] World Cup has only been won by European and South American teams; no one outside of these continents has ever won a football World Cup. But we have a road to the Esports World Cup, with 1.5 million people participating directly in qualifiers. We had a last-chance qualifier where the guy who won Tekken came out of Pakistan.”

“The national ecosystem allows you to tap into everything that has been built around sports for the last 200 years and amplify that for esports,” he adds, before going one step further. “Esports is not here to become traditional sports. My job is to make it the best version of esports it can be.”

Bringing it all home 

As the CEO of the Esports Foundation, and spearheading its multiple offshoots, Reichert’s days are packed. But his ultimate focus remains on the individuals — the gamers — who, like himself, have dedicated themselves to a calling. 

For many players, there’s potentially millions of dollars on the line. But most of that is still fantasy; it hasn’t yet sunk in that they’re playing their favorite game as a job. For that, Reichert recommends financial advisors (“they should all have one”); but the childlike fascination never ends.

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“Every single time I walk into a stadium, it’s a proof point that what we believed 25 years ago became reality,” Reichert says, “The other side is that I want to show everyone how great this shared moment is. It’s a sense of pride, a sense of fulfillment. It’s a lot of life philosophy. What is life about? It’s about experiences and shared moments; I want to share this moment with as many people as possible.”