XCalibur.GG co-owners Marc ‘Omni’ Busby (left) and George Spour (right), photo by Fergus Brewis
Excalibur. The legendary sword wielded by British leader King Arthur. It’s gone on to be referenced in countless films, video games and in culture. It’s been pulled from the stone, turned into a Disney film, and now a new business has taken the name on its quest to improve custom jerseys for UK esports teams.
XCalibur.GG is a new apparel business formed by Marc ‘Omnimushu’ Busby (aka Omni), founder of former esports org DarkSpawn Gaming and grassroots tournament organiser UKEL, and George Spour, co-owner of org Clique Esports.
So why launch this business, and why now?
The idea originally came from Marc’s days running DarkSpawn, when he struggled to find a B2B merch company.
“It really frustrated me we couldn’t find somebody who could do the merch in a timely fashion for a good price,” Marc explained in a video interview with Esports News UK at Insomnia68.
“When I ran DarkSpawn, we went through four or five [apparel] companies, and every time orders either took a really long time to arrive – I’m talking months – or the stitching/quality was poor, or they didn’t wash very well, or they were extortionately priced.
“So [my then-wife] Jen said: ‘Why don’t we just do it? We’ve got a load of sewers, we’ve got all the printing kit’.
“I repair, design and build printers. My entire background, for nearly 25 years, is I work on the printers that make apparel. So we were the perfect people to do it.
“So we started that journey, unfortunately things went sideways with me and Jen, but I carried that on. The pandemic hit, it all stopped, the equipment sat there so I sold it all again. But then coming out of the pandemic, George asked me if I could still get jerseys. So we had a serious conversation and thought, ‘let’s do it’.
“And now we’re launching.”
Update (July 20th 2023): Xcalibur has launched a new website:
‘We want to offer decent quality eco-friendly jerseys at a low cost’
Some of the bigger esports/gaming/lifestyle organisations out there, like 100 Thieves, can offer to sell hoodies for £60+ and fans will buy them, but for smaller UK esports organisations, they may need to look at a lower price.
But a lower price can mean lower quality – something Marc and George want to avoid.
“So we want to eradicate the problems we’ve seen in the past,” Marc added. “We want decent quality, we want it to be eco-friendly and the cost needs to be low.”
George Spour added: “We’re going to have premium quality but with afforable prices.”
How much do items cost, what are the expected prices?
Marc continued: “The teams can sell whatever they want to sell for – if they want to [try and] sell a £50 jersey, they won’t sell it, but that’s on them! Faze and Fnatic will, but grassroots orgs need to be around the £25 mark, realistically.
“We offer T-shirts, direct to garment, sublimation… so trousers, hoodies, shorts, jerseys, bags, you name it. Anything that can be sewn together. Custom fit, slim fit etc. Skin-tight rugby shirts if you want!”
XCalibur.GG is aiming to produce custom jerseys on a lead time of 20 working days, and has asked organisations to send them vector-based artwork.
And the more jerseys a team orders, the cheaper each will cost. As an example, one org was recently quoted £18.50 per shirt.
“When I ran DarkSpawn, we went through four or five apparel companies, and every time orders either took a really long time to arrive – I’m talking months – or the stitching or quality was poor, or they didn’t wash very well, or they were extortionately priced. We thought, why don’t we just do it ourselves?”
Marc ‘Omni’ Busby, Xcalibur.GG
The XCalibur.GG website isn’t live just yet, but it’s due to launch soon. So, what if someone wants to place an order now?
George Spour commented: “Teams can reach out to us [on Twitter and email, see the bottom of this article], we’ve taken orders and provided jerseys.
“You can very much feel like a number when you contact some companies, but I like chatting to people so they can reach out to me. I’m here to talk [to UK esports orgs].
“We’ll also be very honest about lead times. Get your orders in as soon as you can. And reach out to an apparel designer, I know it’s money but it will save you so much time. They’ll get the vector art done for you.”
What’s next for UKEL and Clique?
George Spour spoke about Clique having an excellent UK Quake player in RMV and FIFA player Planet Toast, as well as Clique picking up a CSGO roster.
And Marc Busby spoke of UKEL’s future after its League of Legends tournament was shut down by Riot Games, due to Riot and Freaks 4U opting for their own in-house leagues.
“Our plan for UKEL going forward is to replicate what we did in League of Legends with other games,” Marc said. “The first one we’re looking at is Rocket League. We’re still working with Riot, we’re going to launch a community for Wild Rift – it will be a Discord community, Twitter and social media, and we’ll eventually run tournaments via Wild Rift.
“We also have a very casual Pokémon Unite league going, but it hasn’t has a lot of interest as there’s no prize pool, and there was the official Pokémon Unite Championship Series announced with a $1m+ prize pool, so everyone has gone that way. But we are talking to them to see what we can do.”
You can follow XCalibur, Omni, George Spour, UKEL and Clique Esports on Twitter here, email George at XCalibur and visit the XCalibur.GG website here
Insomnia esports coverage powered by AGON by AOC – see the AGON League of Legends monitor here and more i68 esports news and coverage here
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
