Toxicity, financial irresponsibility, total esports illiteracy: What went wrong with Guild Esports?
A toxic workplace culture rife with bullying and allegations of antisemitism and misogyny. A focus on corporate hires who constantly got in the way of those with any esports knowledge. Flippant overspending, including millions for a celebrity endorsement from a celebrity who barely endorsed it.
Guild Esports was a car crash, and most esports fans saw it coming from the start.
Guild Esports ceased operations earlier this year, leaving content creators and staff unpaid with no mention of ever resolving those obligations.
Esports News UK has spoken with various former staff members, all of whom wished to remain anonymous, to explore what exactly went wrong with Guild Esports and why, ultimately, the project failed.
What was the plan at Guild Esports?
In 2020, Guild Esports announced itself to the world of esports in a bold way.
Guild entered the scene with the backing of England football legend David Beckham, a major celebrity.
The organisation also attracted sponsorships from huge non-endemic brands like Subway and Sky TV.
The higher-ups at Guild were so remarkably confident they would succeed that they became only the second ever esports organisation to function as a publicly listed company, making every decision public and under the microscope.
And there was immediate scrutiny.
As we all know, the esports community can smell inauthenticity from a mile away. It was always going to be difficult to convince people that footballing icon Beckham suddenly had a genuine interest in esports and competitive gaming.
Many immediately feared that Guild were going to rely on an expensive celebrity endorsement with no other substance to their plans… and they were somewhat correct.
Not to say that Guild didn’t benefit from having Beckham as the face of the company. Every staff member we spoke to was excited about the prospect of working with Beckham before joining, and it enticed a lot of esports players and content creators to join too. It was clearly a strong selling point.
And it linked perfectly with Guild’s plans as a UK-centric organisation. There possibly isn’t a bigger UK star they could align with.
One staff member who joined Guild early on told Esports News UK that the higher-ups had a vision of the organisation being focused on a British lifestyle brand:
“It was going to be like a really culturally relevant, switched-on organisation, like your 100 Thieves and FaZe Clans, but their whole angle was that they’re going to be based in the UK, they were going to champion London.
“The American teams have such strong brands and they have such strong cultural association with the esports space. It was bizarre that London didn’t have one.”
Unlike opportunistic franchises like London Spitfire and Royal Ravens, Guild was being built in the UK from the ground up with UK staff for UK fans.
There absolutely was an opportunity for Guild to establish themselves as the UK’s top esports team and culturally connect with British esports fans. As a result, they could have potentially sold a ton of merchandise and built a loyal fan base. Then perhaps Guild would have generated enough revenue to justify their big-money investments.
But again, that inauthenticity meant very few ever formed any sort of connection with the brand.
Guild also partnered with huge content creators like Niki ‘Nihachu’ Sembowski as well as various British stars like Gee Nelly, Harrie Silver and Stevie White.
But with no concrete plan to utilise that star power and no incentive for fans to support Guild other than the fact they were partnered with big names, these creator partnerships were essentially useless.
Spend it like Beckham
Guild Esports were certainly not afraid to spend and to begin with, they had money to play with.
Towards the end of September, Guild had raised £20million in funding and had completed its floatation on the London Stock Exchange with a market capitalisation of £41.2m.
Yet, earlier this year, Guild’s stock had fallen by over 90% from its peak, and it was previously reported that the company was dealing with losses around the £2m mark.
While it seemingly is no longer available, multiple former Guild staff members mentioned that on the London Stock Exchange website, you could see comments from angry shareholders and witness Guild’s downfall live as it happened.
Guild were spending huge sums of money and were not seeing much return. Reports suggest that the organisation spent at least £15m for five years to have David Beckham’s image rights.
Yet, multiple sources said it was difficult to arrange access to the celebrity for content. The footballer’s involvement in Guild was claimed to be very limited.
And realistically, that makes sense. It would be completely understandable that David Beckham Ventures wouldn’t want the star to appear in a lot of content with an organisation that was struggling with viewership, fandom and reach.
An anonymous source claimed that Guild were using view bots to artificially enhance their numbers, leading to multiple videos with high views but very few comments.
This video featuring Beckham has over a million views, yet only 356 likes and 17 comments. It would make sense that decision makers at Guild would want to inflate numbers so that a video with Beckham did not appear to perform badly, but this is an unconfirmed allegation.
And the content creator expenses weren’t cheap either. One anonymous source suggested Nihachu was being paid a four-figure monthly sum just to feature a Guild Esports logo in the corner of her stream and it would then cost more to have creators participate in campaigns.
The same source claims that they heard some content creators were owed at least six months of pay, and that was long before Guild was put up for sale and failed to pay multiple female content creators.
And sources claim that despite the partnership with Sky, the organisation was bleeding money through paying for the upkeep and exorbitant rent in Shoreditch, London, for the Sky Guild Gaming Centre.
Guild did not understand the esports community
As many feared from Guild Esports’ initial announcements, there seemingly weren’t a lot of members of staff who understood the esports industry.
The higher-ups certainly did, former Chief Executive Carleton Curtis had previously worked for Activision Blizzard and led the global strategy for the Overwatch League and Call of Duty League.
And there were staff who were experts on the esports industry, Ninjas in Pyjamas’ new COO Grant Rousseau was leading Guild’s esports operations.
Yet, multiple sources suggested to Esports News UK that corporate hires and powers held the organisation back. Particularly on the commercial and partnership teams, which led to constant friction.
One anonymous source said: “It was people who don’t understand this industry trying to learn on the job, building out what they wanted to be, a tier one esports team.”
Another added: “They didn’t even understand gaming. Like most of them, especially the partnership team, pretty much all of them, they didn’t really play games.”
One source argued that partnerships were perhaps the most important team to have knowledge of the esports industry, as sponsorships are more successful when they’re genuine and are of interest to esports fans.
This led to tension as the partnerships teams would regularly ask for access for players without considering tournament schedules, one source claimed they wanted one of their esports teams to fly in to the UK from Sweden for sponsored content with only a couple of days’ notice.
But where this particularly seemed impactful was in social media and content. Many staff members felt they weren’t able to make content that was actually interesting to esports fans as they had to play it safe.
Allegedly, one former staff member claimed Guild were asked by David Beckham Ventures to stop posting memes on Instagram:
“No more memes, only photos of the influencers, essentially. And that’s kind of what our Instagram strategy boiled down to, was how can we position this influencer in Guild merch?”
Again, a bland approach to social media with no personality meant fans never grew an attachment to Guild Esports. It was the complete opposite of the approach that has been so successful for FaZe and 100 Thieves.
Whether that was down to pressure from big brands or poor decision-making from people with little knowledge of esports, is hard to say.
Interestingly, one former staff member saw staff coming in from outside of esports as a positive:
“Why not get experts from other parts of the industry and like the sports industry and make sure that we have really good jersey and make sure that we have really commercial partners?”
Meanwhile, another former employee disagreed vehemently, claiming:
“When people are jumping from one industry to another, I feel like it’s not a good sign because it probably means that they can’t get any more work in that other industry.
“I think it’s definitely like a story of mismanagement, but also of like greedy people and unkind people sort of getting their hands on something that they don’t understand and just trying to get as much money out of it as possible.
“There were people in there that really wanted to do right by the org and wanted to turn into something good. But unfortunately, they couldn’t compete with these more cutthroat people who I think they were just using it like to, you know, get ahead in their career and get more money.”
A workplace so toxic, League of Legends players wouldn’t touch it
A constant theme from every former employee we spoke to was how toxic the workplace became at Guild.
As mentioned previously, there were tensions between the various teams of employees within the company.
So much so that some we reached out to for comment turned the opportunity down as they did not want to relive that stage of their lives.
Former employees alleged that there was a lot of workplace bullying, particularly from one member of the marketing team who was mentioned by every person we spoke to.
In fact, multiple former staff members mentioned the alleged bullying from this individual as the reason they and others quit the company. The individual was also accused of making antisemitic comments. Guild had an office which was formerly a synagogue and comments were allegedly made about ‘covering up’ a Star of David symbol on the side of the building, as well as other remarks to Jewish staff.
One former employee who spoke to Esports News UK claimed they quit Guild due as this individual caused them a ‘mental health crisis’ and alleged that they and some others who worked at the company began self-harming due to the workplace bullying.
There was allegedly a very high turnover in staff at Guild due to this atmosphere, which some claimed led to the lack of esports understanding and interesting content from Guild.
What could have been
Guild Esports had a lot of potential and tried to do a lot of good things.
There certainly has always been potential for a UK-based esports organisation to thrive, to compete on the global stage while taking advantage of the cultural hub that is London to connect with fans authentically.
While it was ultimately tokenistic and unfortunately shallow, Guild did somewhat serve women well, especially by supporting women’s rosters.
Instead, Guild unfortunately became an example of exactly what NOT to do when running an esports organisation.
Throwing money at popular celebrities and creators with no brand identity or social media strategy does not attract fans; in fact, in esports, it repels them.
Don’t expect esports to be the same as traditional sports. You can’t expect immediate profits. Academies likely won’t work. Viewers won’t automatically support the closest team geographically.
Failing to address a toxic work environment will cause talented staff members to leave, and not having a workforce with a strong knowledge of the industry will always lead to disaster. Especially if you’re investing millions of pounds and have expectant shareholders waiting for immediate profits.
A guild is defined as ‘an association of people for mutual aid or the pursuit of a common goal.’ Ironically, it was that lack of cohesion and clear goal which caused Guild Esports to fall apart.
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