Yuzus lights up Piccadilly Circus after winning Esports World Cup

UK Rainbow Six Siege player Josh ‘Yuzus’ Pritchard is being featured on a display at London’s Piccadilly Circus after winning an Esports World Cup trophy.

He won the Rainbow Six Siege 2024 Esports World Cup in Saudi Arabia earlier this month, with Team BDS.

BDS were dominant in the tournament, beating w7m 3-0 in the grand final. This earnt them 1,000 Esports World Cup Club Points and $750,000 in first-place prize money.

Their roster consists of French players Shaiiko, BriD and LikEfac, Turkish player Solotov and Brit Yuzus. The latter two were previously a part of the MNM Gaming Rainbow Six Siege roster, who left the UK esports organisation over a lack of payments last November, before MNM Gaming entered administration earlier this year.

Yuzus joins several other esports players and personalities who are being featured in billboards around the world to celebrate the conclusion of the Esports World Cup. This includes Gaimin Gladiators Dota 2 winner Quinn at New York Times Square and League of Legends winner Faker at Seoul’s Gangnam District.

Billboards were personalised in each country to feature a player from their respective territory.

Billboards featured the Esports World Cup logo and imagery, with the wording: ‘History made. Here. Now. Forever.’

The inaugural Esports World Cup event, which claims to have recorded more than 500m viewers who consumed over 250m hours of content, concluded on Sunday August 25th. Saudi org Team Falcons lifted the Club Championship Trophy in Riyadh and won $7m of the overall $60m prize pool.

Brit Grant Rousseau, Global Director of Esports and European Director of Operations for Team Falcons, was on stage as Team Falcons were awarded the main trophy by HRH Prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud (Chairman of the Saudi Esports Federation) and Ralf Reichert (CEO, Esports World Cup Foundation). Ralf is also a founder of ESL, which was acquired by Saudi’s Savvy Games Group in early 2022.

In other Siege news this week, Epic.LAN announced it would be hosting the Siege T2 EU esports finals in early 2025.

The Esports World Cup player billboards around the world

The full list of locations and players is as follows:

• Kingdom Tower (Riyadh, KSA) – Team Falcons, EWC 2024 Club Championship Winners
• Times Square (New York, USA) – Quinn (Gaimin Gladiators), EWC 2024 DOTA 2 Winner
• Piccadilly Circus (London, UK) – Yuzus (Team BDS), EWC 2024 Rainbow 6 Winner
• Gangnam District (Seoul, Korea) – Faker (T1), EWC 2024 League of Legends Winner
• Royal City Avenue (Bangkok, Thailand) – Peter (Team Falcons), EWC 2024 Free Fire Winner
• Jin Bukit Bintang (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) – Sekys (Selangor Red Giants), EWC 2024 Mobile Legends: Bang Bang Winner and MVP
• Av. Visc. de Albuquerque (Rio De Janeiro, Brazil) – Mafioso (Alpha7 Esports), EWC 2024 PUBG Mobile Winner
• Ortigas Avenue (Manila, Philippines) – Shinoa (Omega Empress), EWC 2024 Mobile Legends: Bang Bang Winner and MVP
• Bund (Shanghai, China) – Yinuo (KPL Dream Team), EWC 2024 Honor of Kings Winner

Related opinion article: Navigating through Saudi Arabia’s continued rise in esports and feeling conflicted

Dom Sacco

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.