The more you look at Western vs Korean training schedules, the more you’ ll find that Korean teams carry the notion that the success of the team stands above the well-being of the players at all times. This of course has negative effects as well: More and more often allogations arise about organisations treating the players in very inhumane ways. Be it the huge Starcraft 2 matchfxing scandal of 2015, the AHQ match fixing scandal, which led to the suicide attempt of their former ADC Promise, or the recent allogations of the Korean Overwatch team“ Mighty Storm” treating their players in inhumane ways, the list of Korean eSport scandals goes on. The bigger the competition, the bigger the corruption. A sad rule of thumb, that eSports isn’ t free of.
Lastly, let’ s look at Football as another example of cultural differences having a massive impact: In the USA, Football( or as they call it“ soccer”) is viewed as a girls sport, whereas men are encouraged to play American Football or Basketball. Subsequently, the US’ womens team is one of the, if not the best football team in the World, whereas the Men’ s team is happy about making the Quarterfinals at best. All the previously mentioned factors, cultural influences and the subsequent amount or lack of monetary support in comparison to other sports have a huge impact on this. US citizens aren’ t naturally worse at football than Brasilians, Germans or Italians, it’ s their culture that rewards other areas of interest more, resulting in a huge discrepancy of skill level. The same applies for eSports and Korea vs the West.
I hope this article helped you to understand as to why South Korea in particular tends to outperform all other regions when it comes to most eSport disciplines. Simply put, the level of citizens playing, the monetary support and the amount of dedication is unmatched by the Western regions, and there is little to argue that this is about to change, unless Western players too are willing to train for 14-16 hours a day. What we as fans can do, is to support the growth of the professional scene whenever we can, by tuning in whenever there is an international tournament like IEM, MSI or Worlds, and to voice our support during the regular splits as well. And maybe, just maybe, one day we’ ll see another Western team lifting the Summoner’ s Cup. A man can dream.