If anything, this past weekend with Tom Brady winning his seventh Super Bowl ring at the age of 43 shows that even in a very physically demanding sport, there’s no substitute for experience. Whilst physicality and a lifetime of great health choices do play their part, it’s still a huge achievement for those athletes getting on in years. With esports being the newest, and fastest growing entry into the sporting world, the same questions are being asked – do we stick with older, experienced players, or do we pursue the youth? And it’s certainly a tough question to ask.
Where traditional sporting has the physicality to deal with and how an aging body can struggle with remaining in the condition it needs to perform, esports has the same issue where long periods of play can lead to injuries of their own but also the aspect of slowing down with reaction time and hand eye co-ordination being the most cited reason many pro-players don’t last as long – but there are drawbacks being seen for the youth too by bringing them on too early as the pressure of performing on the big stage as well as burnout have become all too common. There are those that believe that the future for esports is definitely within experience, perhaps the most well known League of Legends player, ‘Faker’, recently explored why he feels the average age of esports players will only increase in time, being just 24 himself – where many may have doubted the statement, Tom Brady’s win in another sport on clarifies how important experience is, particularly in a cerebral game where decision making is more important.
In many aspects, it also helps that the gaming landscape for esports is also changing as more game variety pulls away from the extremely high actions-per-minute titles like Starcraft, and settles in more relaxed areas – games such as football for example as this fifa 2020 review available at esportsbetting.site shows one of the faster growing names in esports, without such a huge demand on the player to be as fast or as accurate as in some other games, and certainly lends itself to being a title that doesn’t require youth to perform well at.
Time will only tell here, it’s easy to forget that esports in its current form and size has only really been around for the past decade, it’s still a very new sport as a whole where even the most experienced players in the professional scene are on the back end of their 20’s, hardly ‘old’ by any standard. Whilst a youth scene still develops, it seems the current focus for now will be bringing up the young stars, but there’s certainly an opportunity for change.