With Eintracht Spandau, the new center of the German gamer scene is just emerging in the outskirts of Berlin. The team’s creators are prepared to invest millions in it. A clever strategy is intended to turn it into a brand.

The offices of the new e-sports club Eintracht Spandau are still a bare complex. A bare concrete floor, in many places the walls are still unplastered. And it’s in this unfinished structure that Johannes Gorzel confidently says, “The topic of e-sports in Germany must be taken further in our eyes.” Gorzel is the club’s managing director. “We’re also doing that by setting new standards in business.”

Stirring up the scene from Spandau

From January 2022, the club is to compete in the highest German division of the computer game “League of Legends”, in the so-called Prime League. From Spandau, the club is to stir up the e-sports scene, according to the plan. Up to two million euros are to be invested in players and marketing; these are new spheres for e-sports in this country.

The new gaming rhinoceros is being sent into the race by the renowned marketing agency Jung von Matt and the Spandau-based influencer agency Instinct3. This begs the question: What do the people behind it hope to achieve?

In order to better understand the motives of the gamer start-up in Spandau, one should consider the dimensions of the hype surrounding “League of Legends” (LoL), a computer game in which – to put it simply – the goal is to destroy the base of another team on a virtual playing field. In 2015, the final of the LoL World Championship took place in the Berlin Arena at Ostbahnhof. It took 90 seconds before all of the 12,000 spectator tickets were sold out. The audience in front of the screens at the time totaled 36 million.

That’s a big market with immense advertising capacity that still needs to be exploited. Eintracht Spandau – which is not a “club” in the legal sense, more a “joint venture” – now wants to get at it.

Being like St. Pauli

The team, which consists of five players plus substitutes in League of Legends, is not even complete yet. All the new club has going for it at the moment is a loud-mouthed image campaign that runs through press releases, Instagram, and YouTube.

Eintracht Spandau “the St. Pauli of e-sports,” a press release says, referring to the hip Hamburg soccer club. Eintracht Spandau, it says, is a team that is “identity-forming,” “emotional,” “stylish” and, above all, “authentic.” These are all attributes that one does not normally associate with e-sports – and which, of course, are also made up out of thin air in the case of Eintracht Spandau. But that’s what it’s all about: making the club known, developing it into a brand. Then, according to the calculation, the financiers will also come. “We have a product that simply has value for advertisers,” says Gorzel.

The videos deliberately play on the pansy, small-town image of Berlin’s outlying district of Spandau [youtube.com]. The team is said to be firmly rooted there. “If you say this is a retirement home here as a district, then you have to say, no, we are cool, we are hip,” says Johannes Gorzel. He puts numbers to how central marketing is: the club plans to spend up to a million and a half euros on it alone in the first year, he says. “We have a content machine,” he says. By “content,” he means entertaining videos and social media posts about the team – this media content is intended to raise awareness of Eintracht Spandau and paint a positive picture of the club.

Influencer Max Knabe as a drawing card

The figurehead and face of the club is Max Knabe, one of the co-founders of Eintracht Spandau and a resident of Berlin’s West district since 2014. In the gaming scene, he goes by the name “HandOfBlood” and as such is considered the gaming influencer with the widest reach in Germany. His more than two million followers on YouTube alone mean plenty of customers for the marketers of the e-sports project.

The fact that Eintracht Spandau will probably not play a major role among the ten e-sports teams in the LoL Prime League is almost lost in the ballyhoo. But that doesn’t seem to be a top priority for St. Pauli.

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