The difference lies in the fact that a really popular spectator sport mostly comes from a game people have already played at some point or could naturally conceive of(e.g. auto racing as an extension of driving, MMA as an extension of street brawls), and therefore don't need explanations for. Although Counter-Strike has a huge legacy among video games, it hasn't entered the school curriculum like baseball/basketball/football AFAIK, and it's only loosely related to a kind of live combat scenario that few people witness in person.

There's a step-function there where if a major educational institution started pushing a video game, it'd have the awareness to be a sport. But they don't, so the path forward is tied to the whims of the market.

It may work out that the 20th century pro sports model is just not going to be part of this. That model came from an era combining fast travel, broadcast media, and a small number of large sponsors. At first it was teams who travelled by rail and had their games casted over radio. Later, jet planes and TV. But nowadays, with the streaming model, it's diffused to being able to watch live speedrun attempts, an activity which can resemble watching paint dry at times, but which does bring in some income within a long-tail niche audience.

Esport is on the curriculum in some schools in Denmark. Mainly continuation schools (efterskoler) or certain high schools. I guess how it turns out is going to be an interesting experiment.

But you could say the same for most video games: Here is the object. Team shoots their way through until they accomplish the object. The rest is just arcane knowledge of experts.

For newer class-based games like Overwatch, the classes behave so differently and exuberantly that people are going to want to know what ever new flashy effect means. In football, the "classes" blend together and share a common goal. The difference between the Offensive Guard and Offensive Tackle are minuscule to the layperson. However the difference between Reinhardt and Winston are huge, both in terms of playstyle and presentation. Compound this with games adding new classes sometimes as frequently as every three months. That's hard to keep up for the casual viewer.

However you are correct that the objectives in games are usually simple. Push this thing from here to there. Don't let enemy stand here alone. Shoot enemy until no enemy.

I disagree here. I've watched professional sports a fair bit in my life, and I've watched eSports (and played their respective games) a bunch, and from my experience eSports are far more difficult to pick up.

To try and give a reason others haven't really mentioned, professional sports tend to have predictable camera angles and pacing, making it easier to get a complete picture of who is doing what and when. In eSports, the arenas are typically strategically complex, requiring similarly complex camera angles, making it difficult to get a sense of what's going on at any point in time.

> In eSports, the arenas are typically strategically complex

I think that is a key point. In most sports the arenas are quite simple. Most ball sports have some rectangle and you can judge intuitively whether a team is likely in a better position than another. And even in marathon or triathlon or such the course itself may be complex, but you can reduce it to "X meters till finish line" and "athlete A is in front of B" to get a good enough understanding on the situation.

Of course all sports allow for some amount of tactics, when to play a bit more passive, when to attack, ... but you don't need those for some basic experience while watching.

In eSports the arena is complex and hard to preceive, the physics aren't exact as we all know them, the virtual equipment (weapons, boosters, ...) are unknowns.

And then eSports typically are quick, which makes learning hard.

You could trivialize any sport/game down into 3 simple sentences. The problem is that in American football, there really is only 2 type of players that have different rules: QB, and non-QB. Maybe kicker. Same with soccer too, goalie and non-goalie.

In League, there's (at the time of this writing) 140 players (champs) that each have different rules and capabilities assigned to them, because they have different abilities and are used differently strategically. Top/mid/bottom/jungle really doesn't matter much more than player placements like tight-end, offensive tackle, howver.

Counter-Strike has 1 character type, 2 teams, and is so simple to explain. I can explain counter-strike to my mom in one sentence. The places where one should get anxious or excited are immediately obvious to a layperson. Explaining the goal of league is easy, however I'd struggle to explain enough of league to my mom so that she can understand why she should be excited when one specific champ is getting fed, or why the enemy team should be careful about clustering, because of a unique situation in this one specific match that is not always going applicable to a different match.

I'd probably be done explaining a handful of characters by the time the match is over, and she'd forget within 10 minutes. I know this because I've been trying to explain Pokemon since the 90s. She 100% understands football and baseball, however.

"But you could say the same for most video games:"

For games that involve shooting at people, I'd agree. A particular first-person perspective may be difficult to follow but the core is simple and you can pick up the pieces as you go. Quake deathmatches have a lot of interesting arcana to dig into if you want to play at top level, but you can just watch one without any particular skill. From there you can incrementally pick up that shooting someone before the player even saw them is impressive, or that identifying, acquiring, and plinking them with a rail gun in <500ms is pretty impressive. The speed of these things might be inaccessible, but it's not the rule set that is.

Most things have a novice-level entry ramp. My sons seemed to pick up the basics of American Football in about 5 minutes when they were 8. It really isn't that hard. They didn't encounter their first "safety" until quite a while later, for instance, but their lack of knowledge of what a safety is didn't bother them. I've been watching for a lot longer and still couldn't simply whip off the names of all the positions or anything myself.

Not all esports have that, though. I can say from personal experience though that DOTA is impenetrable if you don't know what's going on. I've been at a local restaurant that was playing some matches for whatever reason. I know about video games in general but know nothing about DOTA. I suppose you could say I understood what it was I didn't understand, but I had no idea who was winning, what a good play was, etc.

I mean, at least with real life sports there are no hacky obtuse contrivances because, it's real life, not a videogame with a meta that includes knowledge of engine exploits or intimate knowledge of map geometry. Someone pixel-aligning themselves to throw a blind smoke that bounces off of invisible above-the-map geometry to eliminate a sightline or someone blind firing though a wall-bang because they've counted the seconds since round start and judge someone might be there is obtuse to anyone onlooking via a stream. In football, or golf, or soccer, all the elements of play can be observed all at once without multiple angles needed to explain what's happening.