In June of 2017 ESA was accidentally created, running its first league for Rainbow Six Siege under the name of SCS, the Siege Contender Series. At that time in 2017 there were no amateur leagues in Rainbow Six Siege that would provide esport players the opportunity to compete in the game they loved. SCS was created with no ambitions of becoming a company, but as a small casual league hoping to provide the esports experience to a handful of friendly teams. It would not stay that way for long.

Over the next two months as SCS ran its first season, the Rainbow Six Siege community took note of SCS, and it was excited. Every week more and more people started watching the SCS matches and more and more teams were asking to join in the next season of the league. After the first season of SCS was complete, SCS officially became known as ESA, E Sport Association. What had started out as a small side project had turned into something much bigger.

ESA grew quickly. In October of 2017 ESA started its second season. In January of 2018, at the start of ESA’s third season, ESA expanded to two leagues with one league being called the Contender Series and the second league, a higher level league, called the Champion Series. In April of 2018, at the start of ESA’s fourth season, ESA expanded to three leagues, adding the Rival Series under the Contender Series. In July of 2018, at the start of ESA's fifth season, ESA expanded to Europe adding its fourth league, the European Champion Series. Finally, in July of 2019, at the start of ESA’s ninth season, ESA expanded to five leagues, adding the European Contender Series.

ESA ran the North American Rival Series, the European and North American Contender Series, and the European And North American Champion Series for eight seasons. Over that time ESA’s popularity grew every season.

At the beginning of each season ESA held a double elimination qualifier tournament to give new teams an opportunity to earn a position in one of the leagues. These tournaments would see up to 200 teams participating at once. During each season every match of every league was broadcasted. This entailed each week having four days of fourteen hours of matches broadcasted, and two days of seven hours of matches broadcasted. ESA ran and broadcasted matches 40 weeks a year.

Overall, ESA hosted 16 seasons of 54 leagues and 44 tournaments. ESA had more than 3,500 players participate in leagues, and more than 11,500 players participate in tournaments, with players from over 25 different countries. ESA broadcasted matches 275 hours a month, bringing in over 85,000 views a month, and over 1 million broadcast minutes watched a month, from over 40,000 followers across different platforms. To pull all of this off took an amazing team of up to 50 ESA team members from 15 different countries. 

After sixteen seasons of leagues ESA stopped hosting all leagues. The mission of ESA to improve and expand the esport experience for everyone at every level of every esport game remained, but ESA was far from achieving that mission, and ESA would not have been able to continue to work to achieve that mission by continuing with the strategy in place at the time. ESA was completely self funded, and all of its available resources were engaged in maintaining the operation of the ongoing leagues, leaving no time or money available to dedicate to improving its current league or expanding to more leagues, both of which being necessary to achieving ESA’s mission.

ESA has a plan in place to overcome this challenge, and over the past two years ESA has been working hard behind the scenes to realize this plan. A small part of this plan includes a complete overhaul to ESA’s production quality, bringing it in line with the best of the best in the broadcast industry. You may see this production overhaul on display in future ESA tournaments and special events.

You can get a preview of some of these production improvements by checking out the Sneak Peek page.