Barcelona’s other sports city

Barcelona, ​​March 4, Barcelona Sports City has been located in Sant Joan Despi since 2006. There they train football and the professional sections of the club. But since this winter, the Barcelona entity has another sports city, located in Barcelona’s Poblenou neighborhood, where the esports division of the Premier League (LoL) spends whole days. The Barcelona International Game Center (BIGC) has an area of ​​2,000 square meters and in mid-March it will be running in all its splendor after some intense work. It will have a gym, game rooms and one of the largest stadiums in Europe. All this will provide more resources for the Barcelona headquarters, who are surprisingly second in the table in their start in the competition. The players, dressed in Barcelona clothes, train and play matches in a room with powerful computers that is also equipped to provide interviews and statements to the media with appropriate ‘props’ in the background. There, near the emblematic Poblenou cemetery, the athletes arrive first thing in the morning and leave many times when it is already dark. For this first season, the Catalan club has selected foreign players with a high level of projection: Czech Jakub ‘Dreedy’ Viceník, Bulgarians Dimitar ‘Lebron’ Kostadinov and Mihail ‘Twohoyrz’ Petkov, Britain’s Matthew ‘Deadly’ Smith and Switzerland’s Luca ‘Lucky’ Santos . They were trained by the Spaniard Alejandro Mapache Parejo. “Deadly” tops the list of the best player in the regular phase of the competition with seven players, tied with “Oscarinin” of Fnatic TQ, the undisputed leader who has won all matches so far. “My family and friends in the UK are amazed that I am in Barcelona. Everyone knows this club. The British player explains to EFE.” Other League of Legends clubs have other esports or esports divisions, but Barcelona is a historic club. It is very nice that he got into esports,” he adds. The Barça Attack Damage Carry (ADC), one of the positions with the most responsibility on the team, says that most days it is he and his teammates, who live about a 10-minute drive away From BIGC, between “seven or eight hours in the office.” But there are days when the day is extended “up to 10 hours if you need to train something.” In any case, there are places to rest during the day, such as going to the supermarket to buy Something and seizing the opportunity to relax a few meters off the coast of Barcelona. That moment usually involves sharing some secrets that go beyond the game and the competition.” This club inspires us too. “Mapachi,” says the coach, while behind him the players practice on their computers. Barcelona’s second place in a few days to finish the regular stage of the spring season will mean, as long as he maintains it, that the pass to the final of the competition (dated March 30 in Seville) can be played with one eliminator against the top seed: Fnatic TQ. “It was a surprise that the project was good from the start,” admits the Barcelona manager. “We expected to go from less to more, but everyone is adding from the start. The challenge is to maintain it over time, and to keep growing,” he explains. Mapache wants to make it clear that “the project is in the medium and long term, to achieve great performance in a year and a half or two years.” In this sense, “All boys have a lot of room for improvement and really want to get to the top, now the goal is more process than result.” Barcelona’s arrival in the Superliga, organized by the Liga de Videojuegos Profesional (LVP) of the Mediapro group, came after the club took over the S2V team’s place and paid the licensing cost, less than 500,000 euros. “BIGC was born out of the minds of the clients, from the projects they asked us. I have been a TV professional for 20 years and this space has been a recording set. Video games are now the new medium of communication and clients have asked us to create content and synthesize all of this, which is what We made it logical later,” explains Jean-Sebastien Ventura, CEO and Founder of BIGC. In September 2021, this center reached a commercial agreement with an investment fund from Singapore, Visionist Ventures, and from this union came Gamers Hub Media Events Europe (GHME), a project based on creating video game content and organizing eSports tournaments. Around the world has a subsidiary in Dubai and has become the first sponsor of this division of Barcelona. “Barcelona is one of the strongest brands in sports worldwide, it gives us a lot of credibility and clarity because they are here with us, they believed in this project,” continues Ventura from BIGC “Square”. The 2021 Summer Super League final was held here, which was won by Vodafone Giants. Sergio Escudero