Garbage In, Garbage Out: How Esports Makes Decisions With Sourceless Spreadsheets

At a recent mid-season review meeting at an esports organization in Incheon, the CEO opened with a single slide: “Viewership growth of 34% year-over-year.” The room nodded. Not one person asked where that 34% came from — from a streaming platform API, from a publisher report, or from a spreadsheet an intern filled in by hand at eleven at night. I sat at the end of the table, opened my laptop, and tried to trace it back. Twenty minutes later, I found that the figure existed in no official document whatsoever. It was the product of a duplicated data sample, reformatted to look tidy. That moment captured something I had suspected for years as a club financial analyst: the biggest problem in esports is not a lack of data. We are drowning in data. The problem is that the data is often empty at its root, and nobody has the courage to say so. Players do not have a price — they have a story, and the market does not know how to read it. But before you can read the story, you need one honest number. Esports has entered a genuinely industrialized phase over roughly the past seven years. Sponsorship is up, broadcast rights are up, regional tournaments are springing up like mushrooms after rain. But alongside that money is a patchwork reporting ecosystem. A regional tournament announces “millions of concurrent viewers,” but when you ask about measurement methodology, the answer is “aggregated across platforms.” A team boasts “200% commercial growth,” but nobody clarifies whether that revenue comes from a new sponsorship, from jersey sales, or from money the owner injected and then labeled revenue. I once saw an esports organization’s financial report show a sponsorship revenue line jump 180% in a single quarter. The number was so pretty that leadership used it to raise the next funding round. But when I requested a breakdown by counterparty, it turned out that 70% of the increase came from a single deal with one betting sponsor, signed as a one-time prepayment, recognized entirely in one period. World Cup broadcast revenue is the prettiest number of all when you never ask where it comes from. What worries me is not that someone lies. What worries me is how this industry operates with empty data. When an analyst is tasked with evaluating a transfer contract, what they typically receive is: player name, age, KDA, and a highlight video. No salary structure, no release clause, no injury data, no opponent analysis. They are forced to draw conclusions from an almost blank sheet — and when they do, they are not analyzing, they are guessing. In a proper multi-layer deep analysis, a correct pipeline must walk through nine dimensions: patch and meta, tournament format, roster and players, regional landscape, club finance, rules compliance, risk profile, public narrative, and whole-industry transmission. Every dimension needs specific input data. But when the upstream extraction layer returns an empty table — no tournament name, no team, no player, no patch, no transaction — the downstream analysis layer can do nothing but mark “unassessable.” Any conclusion produced under those conditions is fabrication. Esports is not football’s rival. It is a mirror exposing the entire spending habit of this industry. And that habit, under the light of data, reveals an uncomfortable truth: most investment decisions in esports are made on figures with no traceable origin. An investor reads an article saying tournament X has 50 million viewers. They do not check whether that number is cumulative views or concurrent viewers, global or single-region, real accounts or bots. They just need it to be big enough to nod at. Every valuation model is wrong. The question is: wrong in whose favor. When an esports organization values a tournament slot at tens of millions of dollars, it is pricing on growth expectations, not on actual cash flow. Those expectations are fed by sourceless spreadsheets — and at some point, the number must return to reality. There is a paradox here that few in the industry admit. The basic principle of data analysis is “garbage in, garbage out.” But in esports, what comes out usually looks beautiful — a triple-digit growth figure, a colored ranking table, an upward chart. The beauty of the output conceals the emptiness of the input. And because the output looks good, nobody bothers to go back and check the input. Some people in the industry will tell you: “Data is data, who cares where it came from.” Let me translate that for you in financial-management language: when you pour capital into an asset whose true value you do not know, you are not investing — you are gambling. Esports is running like a casino labeled a “hot growth industry.” Crises do not destroy; they define. 2026 did not destroy football — it wiped out models that had long been dead. And I believe a similar purge awaits esports, as cheap money dries up and investors begin to demand provenance. For fans, this may sound remote. It is not. Every time a tournament announces a huge prize pool and then pays late for years, every time a team dissolves because wages go unpaid while it still flaunts sponsorship revenue, every time a rights contract is priced on expectation rather than reality — the final price is always paid by the audience and by the people who work in the industry. The question I want to leave is not who is lying. The question is: are you willing to ask where that number comes from, even when it excites you?