In 2024 I was in Riyadh for the Esports World Cup, working with SPORTFIVE on brand activations for Logitech G, Unilever’s AXE and Clear, and Barns Coffee: influencer collaborations, live esports tournaments, and the on-site execution that holds it all together. Before that I had spent years on football sponsorships across the Gulf, so I came in with a traditional sports lens.
What surprised me was not the size of the crowds. It was how naturally non-gaming brands fit in once they stopped treating esports as a niche and started treating it as a place where young people spend their time. Back in Colombia, I think local brands are in a similar position to Gulf brands a few years ago: the audience is already there, and most of the sponsorship space is still open.
The audience is already big, and it isn’t just teenagers
Latin America has 372.3 million players, growing 4.5% a year, according to Newzoo’s Global Games Market Report 2025 (gamescom latam, 2026). Across Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, Gen Z now makes up 47.5% of players.
In Colombia specifically, industry estimates put the gaming population at around 10 million people (La Nota Económica, 2024). The age split is the part brand managers should notice: a third are between 25 and 34, and another quarter are between 35 and 44. This is not a kids’ audience. It is young professionals with salaries, credit cards and brand habits still being formed.
Colombia just made esports a real sport
In July 2025, Colombia signed Ley 2507 de 2025, which recognizes esports as part of the National Sports System (Función Pública). The law calls for federations, leagues and clubs, official registration of competitions and players, minimum ages for competition and protections for minors, and gave the Ministry of Sport twelve months to bring esports into national sports policy (El Universal, 2025).
For a sponsor, structure is what makes a property buyable. Registered leagues, recognized clubs and clear rules mean clearer rights, clearer audiences and less reputational guesswork. In football, those structures took decades to form, and the best sponsorship positions were claimed long ago. In Colombian esports, they are being built right now.
The global brands already made this bet
The Esports World Cup 2025 reported 750 million viewers, 8 billion impressions and 3 million visitors in Riyadh, up from 2.6 million the year before (GamesBeat, 2025). Its sponsor list is not made of gaming companies: PepsiCo, Mastercard, Unilever, Amazon and Adidas were all part of it (Digiday, 2024).
The interesting part is why. PepsiCo’s regional CMO told Digiday that viewership is “not the key deciding factor.” The sponsors were buying on-ground engagement with fans and long-term positioning in a space their future customers live in. That matches what I saw from inside the activations.
What I learned on the floor in Riyadh
1. You don’t need to be a gaming brand. Logitech G belongs at a gaming event. A deodorant, a shampoo and a coffee chain are less obvious, yet they were all there. The question was never “are we a gaming brand?” but “what role do we play in this fan’s day?” Coffee between matches, grooming before the camera, energy for a long session. If you can answer that, you have an activation.
2. Give fans something to do, not a logo to look at. The strongest moments were participatory: live tournaments, challenges and content fans could be part of. Esports audiences are used to interacting, chatting and voting in real time. A static banner competes with the game; an activation that lets fans play, win or appear on stream becomes part of it.
3. Creators are the media plan. Esports fans follow people as much as teams. In my experience, influencer collaborations carried a brand’s message further than anything printed on site, because the message came from someone the audience already trusted, in their own tone.
4. Execution is the product. In traditional sponsorship, the logo placement is often the deliverable. In esports, the experience is the deliverable, and it can go wrong in a hundred small ways: schedules shift, stock runs out, the stream delays, the creator is late. The brands that looked good were the ones with people on the ground solving problems in real time.
How a Colombian brand can start (without a Riyadh budget)
You don’t need a global tournament to test this. A sensible first step looks like this:
- Pick one property, not ten. A local tournament, a university league or an established gaming community in Bogotá, Medellín or Cali. Small, but real and measurable.
- Partner with one or two Colombian creators whose audience matches your customer, and let them shape the content in their own voice.
- Create a physical moment. A viewing night, an in-store qualifier, a branded play zone. Retail, food and beverage brands have an advantage here: you already have the venues.
- Agree on the numbers before you sign. Sign-ups, coupon redemptions, sales at the activation point, content reach. Viewership alone is a weak reason to spend.
- Check the rules. With Ley 2507 now in force, confirm the registration status of the competition and the age profile of the audience, and be extra careful with categories like alcohol or betting where minors may be present.
Run it for one season, measure it honestly, and decide from there. The brands that win in esports sponsorship tend to be the ones that showed up early, learned the culture and grew with the ecosystem, and Colombia’s ecosystem is still early.