Longest Team Partnerships in Esports

Is your brand in it for the long haul? Do long-term partnerships reap greater rewards?

We looked into the longest-running team sponsorships that are still active till this day, only including teams with over 1m in combined social media following, and sponsorships with no more than a year break between.

We found that these teams have had an average compound annual growth rate of 45% since the start of their partnerships.

Our analysis shows how renewing partnerships or multi-year partnerships do not just build brand loyalty and trust but is able to continuously generate increasing brand exposure through the years. For some of these brands like Monster Energy, SKT, G FUEL, and HyperX these long-term sponsorships set the foundation for them to become household names among gamers.

Some honourable mentions of partnerships that did not make it into the top 10 are

• Fnatic with Monster Energy - 5 years, 5 months
• TSM with Geico - 5 years
• LGD Gaming and VP Game - 4 years, 11 months

These brands and teams reignited their flame after taking a break in their partnership:

• SK Gaming and Western Digital - despite being there since the beginning in 2012, the partnership did not resume until 2019.
• Alliance and Razer - The partnership paused between 2014 and 2019.
• Cloud9 and HyperX - despite being close in the past few years, their partnership took a break between 2015 and 2018.

Did these teams and brands miss out on the opportunity to build more established relationships with fans during their years of downtime?

Each team and event profile on GEEIQ is enriched with partnership information. For teams, this includes both past and present partnerships, while event partnerships are available for Premier and Major events and treated as a one-off basis. The duration of all partnerships is also displayed.

In the future, GEEIQ aims to display sponsorships of influencers and content creators.