This article was originally published on GameSpot's sister site onGamers.com, which was dedicated to esports coverage.

　　With their reveal to the public on 16 January 2014, it seemed that few batted an eye when Ninjas in Pyjamas became the first clients of the newly started esports management group Clutch Entertainment. Three people make up the company, they include Andreas Gillberg, a former developer for Ladbrokes, Gustav Käll, a star from World of Warcraft and Ragnar, a 20 year marketing-guru acting as COO of one of Sweden’s biggest media companies.

　　Together they’ve joined forces in hopes of raising the standards for investors, teams and last but not least, players. And today they added yet another team to their clientele in the shape of the up-and-coming Team prOperty, that most famously houses the two Swedish terrans Stefan 'MorroW' Andersson and Jeffrey 'SjoW' Brusi.

　　Aron Larsson, one of prOp's chairmen had the following to say about the deal the two business struck earlier in the week:

　　- We have chosen to sign with Clutch Entertainment as we believe they know how to take eSports to the next level. From a business standpoint, Clutch will be a hugely important partner for Team Property BB2, says Aron Larsson, Chairman of Team Property BB2 .

　　

Interview with Andreas Gillberg, CEO of Clutch Entertainment:

What started Clutch, and what is the subsequent goal of the company?

Clutch was the brainchild of Ragnar Tingström, one of the founders of the Scream media agency (Sweden’s biggest independent media agency) who through Scream, teamed up with Gustav Käll, our primary esports manager, to create marketing campaigns involving esports players (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xCsa9Q50xk), and quickly realized when the promotional videos were released that it was bigger than he could’ve ever imagined. If I recall, I think it was one clip in particular that went viral involving Christopher ‘GeT_RighT’ Alesund which garnered more hits than a clip involving some insane video of Zlatan Ibrahimovic making a goal.

　　(Andreas Gillberg, Ragnar Tingström, Gustav Käll)

　　This made Ragnar more than interested to continue trying to learn the market, and with the help of Gustav he started investigating the entire industry a lot more, and eventually reached the conclusion that there wasn’t a single established company that worked actively for developing the player’s business-endeavors, and there also wasn’t a company who worked actively with other stakeholders within the scene, companies and brands that are trying to reach the esports demographic through promotional means. What we want to be able to do with Clutch is to be able to reach out to already established partners in the scene and make sure that they, as well as the teams and players receive the compensation they should be receiving, but our job will also be to interest outside companies in to this world as well and reach that crucial demographic of young adults between the age of 18-25.

　　It kind of makes for an “Odd Couple” like scenario with all of us being from rather different worlds, I work mostly on the strict business aspect of the project, Gustav knows esports as well as pitching the ideas we come up with with the teams, and Ragnar has a gigantic network of people, media houses and companies we can pitch said ideas to. So to sum it up, I think you could say that the seed of Clutch is wanting to create a link between the general public and esports and truly tap in to all of the untapped potential the entire scene hasn’t experienced yet.

　　

When you look at today’s esports scene regarding both the value of a sponsorship for both the company who are sponsoring said team, and the players on it, do you often find that there’s much more to give each respective side of the deal, and is that something that Clutch are looking to address?

First of all, I think it would be great to actually say right now that it’s hard to gain any kind of metric or statistic on this kind of thing. I wouldn’t doubt that either side of the current NiP-Telia sponsorship has been a very lucrative deal and worthwhile investment for both parties. But when it comes to statistics involving this, I think it’s very fragmented currently.

　　If we’d make a pitch to a potential sponsor who’s never been involved in esports, do we talk about esports as a whole? Viewers on Twitch? These kind of numbers might seem like firm metrics, but how many people actually watch CS:GO daily? Quantifying the value is a very difficult thing to actually do, and you’ve got to be extremely upfront with all the available facts for any potential investor.

　　What is interesting however is that so many of these players really do have these colossal followings, and are obviously marketable in and of themselves. This, in my honest opinion, is sad as they currently aren’t getting what they’re due in terms of monetary compensation. Progamers are grossly underpaid which, in my personal opinion, has given us at Clutch a firm spot in this industry as we feel as if we truly can help contribute on that front, and hopefully, help become a driving force for the entire industry.

　　That is not to say that we too aren’t looking to put food on our own tables, but if we end up making a terrific job and a lasting impression on our clients and their way to do business, more people like us will step in to the field as well and make sure that the entire standard of the industry rises above its current level.

　　

Looking at the industry today, are there any specific practices you’ve found that need to be relooked and reworked completely, and is this one of the goals Clutch has as a company?

How it seems to have worked earlier is that simply one of the players in the organization handled all the business-related aspects for their team. This is helpful for them in the long run as they get a sense of business related topics, but it then makes them distracted from doing what they were brought on the team to initially do, namely play the game. Having to worry about when every contract is looking to be renewed and negotiating your value is quite frankly asking for too much from a player. You won’t find a single actor, musician or athlete handling these decisions. We aim to make sure that every player actually plays the game, nothing else.

　　

Is it safe to assume then that any player or team, who has a broad reach is of interest to you?

I think that’s a fair assumption to make. We don’t discriminate between games or publishers, if that was what you were asking. We look at what players and teams have in terms of exposure, and simply want to help them reach further than they can by themselves and anyone we find interesting will be worth a look-at from us in order to help preserve their brand and name, which a lot of stars actually aren’t doing right now within esports.

　　I think this is actually a very relatable topic to the world of poker. I was the marketing director for Ladbrokes.com in the Nordics and saw the poker boom come and go, and the stars of the tournaments simply faded in to obscurity when the game itself went out of style. I see a similarity in the esports giants, but it’s almost reversed as the trend of video gaming is going the opposite route. It’s growing faster than anyone could imagine and yet these stars don’t enjoy careers that extend beyond five years because no-one like Clutch or a similar agency were there to appeal to their sponsors.

　　After having seen that, I feel like the pitfalls in current-day esports, and our work itself, can be easily avoided if there are people like us there to guide them. Today the players can’t quantify their actual worth, even if they’re told “you are worth a million dollars”, how can they honestly know? Is it lower? Is it even higher due to the global reach of the game they play? I can bet you that the Swedish skiing team currently cost a lot more to sponsor than any of the elite teams in esports, even though their reach is minimal in comparison to teams like Na’Vi, Alliance, EG and NiP. We need to bridge this gap.

　　

Esports itself is a very frail industry, and 2013 showcased that rather perfectly with the subsequent slimming it had to go through last year where a number of teams, and players one wouldn’t even consider being bad off financially folded. Does this ever make it seem like a risk to invest in such an unstable industry?

I can’t really answer that as in-depth as you’d probably want since I haven’t been involved in esports since we got Clutch up and running. But the nature of all things really is that athletes come and go, no matter their stature within the community. But this doesn’t have to mean that their sport or industry as a whole is subsequently shrinking.

　　

Twitch.tv has become one of the largest tools today for players to advertised themselves and their brand, and showcases their own stars outside of the esports side of things. Will you be looking to work with people within this field as well?

Like I said before, if you’re an established team, an up-and-coming team or an interesting personality within gaming we’re more than interested in working with them and their brand. Twitch is a very helpful service, but the issue with pitching it to an investor is that they need it explained to them, and need to understand why all the numbers on it matter, but they have ridden the wave perfectly and have become one of the undoubtedly most powerful tools in esports and its quick rise in the past years, as well as one of the greatest tools in making the player visible in today’s side of things.

　　

Interview with Gustav Käll, Clutch Entertainment's head of esports:

I read an interview in a local newspaper article about you from your WoW-days which focused on your life outside of WoW. You seem to have been one of the few esports personalities from the mid-2000’s that’s taken your interest and truly made a business out of it. How did that come about and how did you reach that point in your life?

I guess you kind of need to hear the whole story to understand how everything became what it currently is on my part. I’ve played games for about as long as I can remember since I had two older brothers who always made sure to have computers in the house.

　　Then when WoW came along, my old team finished second place in the, at the time, prestigious R60 league which was a domestic tournament here in Sweden. After that, World of Warcraft came out and I got in to contact with Kungen and we put all our bright minds together and formed Nihilium out of the two guilds both of them represented. Naturally, friends and family felt pretty unanimously that I was throwing away the best years of my life and that I should go out in to the real world. So I quit my job and applied for the best university in my area and was set on becoming an engineer. I quickly however realized that commuting x hours a day made it pretty impossible, on top of me still playing WoW.

　　So naturally I kept on playing WoW, and we made sure to focus on it more heavily now when I was back full-time, so we created nihilium.eu, which became one of the internet’s 500 biggest sites (alexa rank) with several million unique viewers a week. At the time we just thought we made the most out of it, but looking back, none of us really understood just how massive it all truly was.

　　Then, just before the release of the second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, came out me and a friend decided to start a blog-portal related solely to gaming called Dingblog, where we had a number of pros from different games like Loda from Dota, and of course a ton of Nihilium players who wrote actively on the site.

　　So then WotLK drops, we see we get a massive amount of hits and me and my friend just thought “let’s make this a business”. So we just called Swedish companies and said that we had a lot of traffic. That was enough back in those days so they threw up some ads on the site and we were suddenly actually making some money off of it. On the side of this, I decided to actually create another company related solely to selling advertisements, and that in turn got me to Stockholm and where I am today.

　　Amidst this entire banana-peel story, I realized then that my passion is esports. Nothing will ever change that, but my talent is selling and pitching to advertisers and clients as it lead to Dingblog being absorbed by Nyheter 24-gruppen and me being employed there as key account manager, so that I’ve managed to combine my biggest passion with my best talent is a complete coincidence and I have no idea how I actually ended up here.

　　

You as a former professional gamer yourself probably have a lot of hopes for what Clutch can contribute to esports.

Definitely, if I could come up with a sports example I think the situation esports is in is similar to that of Börje Salming who travelled to America to play hockey in the 1980’s. His initial contract was worth $75,000, and the rest is history. Hockey made the climb from a niche interest to become one of the biggest sports in the entire world, and I think that eSports and companies like Twitch.tv now has become TV for the young generation.

　　With my experience as a seller of ad space I can tell you now that Twitch has greater reach than any of the current Swedish TV channels in the target group of males 15-34, on top of that they charge you close to 2 million dollars just so that they will run your ad, you need to sign an entire year’s contract with them as well. Buying ads on twitch is soon a more lucrative idea, and this puts esports on the absolute centerfold in terms of potential revenue and exposure, which is desperately needed and something Andreas and Ragnar can truly help rectify given their long careers in marketing and management, and I can contribute with my experiences I gained from my days as a competitor where all of us got genuinely exploited even though we commandeered one of the top 500 sites on the internet.

　　

Andreas told me similarly that the entire point of Clutch boils down to players simply becoming full-time players who don’t have to worry about anything else than playing their game at the highest level.

That’s hitting the nail squarely on the head, I’d say. But our job will also be to bring these people in to the know-how of how large the Swedish media houses that are interested in esports really are, and how much they can stand to gain if they can properly find a value for all their actions really are worth. IRM, the Swedish measurement for the money that’s spent outside of nationwide commercials is somewhere around 34 billion SEK, and just realizing how massive this is and that esports actually has a part to play in it is something few people really are aware of.

　　

Seeing as you are the premier esports expert affiliated with Clutch, what was the reason behind accepting the entire NiP organisation as part of your clientele instead of perhaps one single player like Christopher 'GeT_RigHt' Alesund who already has a massive fanbase of his own?

Taking another sports example, I look at NiP like Manchester United. United have won titles over the past 20 years and have also housed some of the most legendary players to have ever played in the sport, so I hope it’s not sounding like I’m trying to take anything away from Alesund – He’s the best of the best and we work close with Christopher to ensure his own brand rises to the level of which he is capable of. Clutch as an enterprise aren’t looking to make a quick move in to the establishment, but we’re aiming for growth and stability for every client we chose to take, and with NiP the name itself is legendary within CS, and being able to make it grow even further is something that’d leave a much longer lasting impact in the industry.

　　

With your recent deal with Ninjas in Pyjamas, you’ve undertaken the business side of two different developers in Valve for CS:GO, and Riot with League of Legends. Both of these game’s professional setting is a complete clash against each other. Does the developer’s stance on how the game should be played competitively factor in to who you decide to associate yourselves with?

I will always try to encourage an open market over a closed market, with that said however, if you allow me to draw another sports-parallel, any established sport is represented by an umbrella “independent” organisation that in turn mediates with any potential investors. That’s KeSPA’s role in a nutshell, if we look at an actual esports example, that makes sure that the players have what they need in order to perform up to the level that’s expected of them. I love League of Legends, but I think that Riot are securing as many rights they possibly can to ensure that their pros wouldn’t attempt to participate in any other game or tournament. Obviously this has proven to be successful for them as it’s the world’s largest video game, but their way of going about things in the competitive scene with the explicit focus being on controlling it rubs me, personally, in the wrong way.

　　I don’t believe in the philosophy of having a single major player, I believe in a world where people and organisations like DreamHack, who I think are doing a fantastic job, and other actors can compete freely to find the best way of actually creating something of their own. I reacted in a similar fashion when Blizzard announced the plans for WCS, as I was still working with Nyheter24 at the time, and achieving a license to broadcast for said tournaments was exceedingly difficult, as Blizzard were very reluctant to let people outside of ESL, who handled the regular broadcasting for the season, produce WCS-related events on their own. It seems counter productive to limit what your community and actors are able to do.

　　

Valve’s model for both CS:GO and Dota 2 is in complete contrast to both Blizzard’s and Riot’s however. How do you view it in comparison in terms of both a financial and player perspective?

Valve handle things in a way I admire extremely much, and their way of then stepping in and letting the audience and themselves finance these four upcoming $250,000 tournaments really helps everyone, and their way of doing business is what I personally prefer.

　　Naturally, however, this won’t interfere with who we chose to work with. I will always stand on the players side of things, and if a player or a team are in a position like NiP are where they commandeer the best CS:GO team in the world, it’s our duty to make sure that advertisers pay them the amount they are due.

　　Photo Credit: clutch.se, movember.se, battle.net