Counter-Strike once teetered on the edge, with only a handful of passionate players competing for fun. But as the scene grew, tournaments naturally followed, organizations poured in, and the need for legal structures arose. I won’t dive too deep into the history, but this exact curiosity led me to wonder what really goes on behind the scenes.
What exactly are player contracts, and how do they work? Why can’t Falcons just sign ZywOo, s1mple, ropz, karrigan, and donk if they have all the money in the world?
To curb my curiosity, and seeking answers, I sat down with an expert, Dejan Minić, who has a deep history in the field. A lifelong Counter-Strike fan, Dejan completed his bar exam during COVID. But as he started working and watched more CS, he realized where his true passion lay. He wanted to be part of that world while applying his legal expertise.
Thus, he pursued the job he loved, starting with consulting in tier-two and tier-three before moving on to ESIC cases and eventually spending three years at BLEED. His diverse experience has given him deep insight into various aspects of the game, knowledge he’s about to share with us.
The role of player agencies in Esports
So going back to our question how player transfers happen. First and foremost, we need to understand the role of player agencies that act as intermediaries between players and orgs. Most professional players are represented by agents who take care of contract negotiations aligning with the personal interests of their client. Others may prefer to negotiate independently to avoid paying a percentage of their salary as fees to an agent.
“Many times organization just won’t respond, so you write directly to the agent and he take the charge of, of everything, uh, and they usually negotiate the personal terms with you. On the behalf of the player, see? It’s standard practice, like maybe 10 percent of players don’t want to be represented because sometimes their fees can be like too high or something like that. It’s usually some kind, let’s say 10 percent of their salary. It vary from agent to agent, but for some players it can be a lot.”
Each player signs a contract with a fixed duration. If a player is already under contract with an org, any team looking to acquire them must pay an agreed-upon buyout fee. Typically, contracts last two to three years, though some highly sought-after prospects may sign for up to five years, but it rarely goes beyond that. Now, you might be wondering, wouldn’t it make sense for orgs to sign every player to long-term contracts to max out potential buyout earnings? Well, not exactly.
Risks of signing long term contracts
Signing a player for too long comes with its own share of risks. If things don’t work out, the org may have to bench the player while still paying a portion of their salary. “If a player is benched, he usually gets 50 percent of, of his base salary, but sometime it can be reduced to like 20 or 30 percent or raised to 70 or 80%. It depends of his agent and his value at the moment of the signing”, Dejan said.
On the other hand, some players receive much lower payments while benched. Take olofmeister, for example. He’s still technically part of FaZe despite not playing an official match in over two years, but I doubt he’s being paid anywhere near 50% of his original salary.
There have been some controversial long-term contracts in the past. For example in 2019, questions were raised over FURIA’s decision to extend contracts for KSCERATO, yuurih, arT, ablej, and VINI on five-year deals. That roster didn’t stick around for much long. In fact, ableJ was benched just a few months later and then retired a year later.
And it’s not just the orgs that feel the impact, players do too. For a fine example, look no further than s1mple. He extended his contract with NAVI in late 2022 for three years. Now, that same deal is keeping him stuck, no team is willing to pay his massive buyout, leaving him in limbo without a place to compete. Yes, s1mple was loaned to Falcons for a “trial period,” which is another common method teams use to temporarily bring in players, and can last anywhere from a single event to several months.
What are the clauses in a contract?
The terms of contracts obviously depend on the quality of the player. High profile names such as ZywOo, NiKo, rightfully ask for lucrative salaries and favorable contract conditions. Meanwhile, younger, lesser-known players may be signed to long-term contracts with relatively low pay, locking them into agreements that benefit the organization more than the individual.
“Unfortunately, there are like double standards to if you sign, let’s say NiKo or ZywOo, one rule will apply. Because you need to forfeit like everything you have in order to keep them in the team and sign them. But if you sign someone who is young, who is talented, you can like, let’s say abuse your position and give him like very small salary, sign him on four years and you don’t need to raise it in that period.”
Dejan gave the example of m0NESY here, “So that’s basically what’s happening with m0NESY right now. He’s playing for so small salary for his standards.” But m0NESY has a long contract and may be blocked from joining another team if G2 refuse to negotiate or sell him.
Contracts often also include clauses that grant the organizations some control over player movements. The “Right of First Option and First Refusal” clause, for instance, obliges a player to inform the team of any external offers. It allows their current organization to match or improve the offer in efforts to retain the player.
There can also be a severance clause for compensation as part of the process when the org decides to terminate a contract before maturity. There can be substantial payouts in some cases, or simple notices in other. But these structured contracts only exist in the top 15-20 teams, beyond which the contracts are not structured as well.
Sticker Money and Org Revenue
Revenue sharing is another aspect of contracts, particularly from the team and player sticker sales in Majors. Players typically receive 100% of the revenue from personal stickers, while their cut from their team sticker varies. Some organizations retain 100%, while others allocate a significant amount to players, depending on sponsorships and other income streams.
“This is where teams and organizations, where they lose the battle with players because you need to have some regular income. In my opinion, it wouldn’t be fair at all for a player who has like 40 or 50k a month to receive so much sticker money, and the organization is barely surviving.
You can probably see how much FaZe had problems. Those guys won the Major and everything, but they gave, as to my knowledge, 90 percent of sticker money to the players. So players were rich, and the organization struggled to maintain their income to be in the esports until they were both out.”
This can hurt the organization. He talked about FaZe, who struggled financially despite winning a Major. They reportedly allocated 80-90% of the sticker revenue to players, which led to financial difficulties and forced them down the path of getting bought out by GameSquare. Esports sponsorships are becoming harder to secure, and Dejan believes orgs must carefully balance player salaries and operational costs, and we will touch on that next.
The Financial Struggles of Orgs
In Esports, orgs often struggle to achieve a sustainable return on investment. Dejan highlighted that the salaries paid to players is substantially high and the revenue streams are limited. Now, to understand the average base salary of tier-one pros, we can refer to es3tag’s salary in Cloud9, which was disclosed to be around €38,000. There was another case of ropz, where speculations based on an Estonian interview he gave suggest his salary to be around €41,000. STYKO also made a youtube video on the subject that provides valuable insights into his earnings in 2023 and 2024.
It doesn’t take much effort to notice that orgs basically pay out multiple millions in just salaries, and financial relief for them only comes in the form of sticker money, prize money, and sponsorships. But not all orgs are able to qualify for the Major, and only top tier teams are able to secure substantial sponsors. This is the reason why most of the orgs operate at a financial loss, especially mid-tier orgs that find it increasingly difficult to survive.
“Everyone wants to sponsor top-three or top-five teams, but what’s with a team who is like ranked 18th, who is good, who has potential, and has no-maybe one sponsors. Sponsors would always offer you equipment but not money. It is very hard to survive in this ecosystem for the orgs.”
ESL’s decision to introduce separate prize pools for teams and players has been seen as a positive step towards improving financial stability. Starting from 2025, they have broken down their prize pool into two shares, one of players and the other of the org. And it goes like this:
- IEM Katowice and IEM Cologne ($1.25 mil)
- Players : $1 million
- Org : $250k
- IEM Dallas, Spring & Chengdu ($1 million)
- Players : $300,000
Org : $700,000
- Players : $300,000
- ESL Pro League 21 & 22 ( $1 million)
- Players : $400,000
Org : $600,000
- Players : $400,000
Respecting the contract and the need of a better ESIC
This is where the problem lies. These contracts have a long history of being violated, and the issue is even more persistent in tier-two due to a lack of resources, on both ends. Pursuing legal action for every breach isn’t always feasible, and such cases have occurred far too often.
Valve hasn’t done much to help in situations like this, which is why the need for a proper regulatory body in esports cannot be overstated. ESIC, the closest thing to one, has its own share of problems. But that’s a discussion for another article—where I’ll dive into ESIC, match-fixing, cheating, and more.
“If I, let’s say, do something out of our contract, and let’s say you are my employer and you are based in India. I need to come in India to sue you. I mean, what are my chances and what are my expenses to do that? And players and smaller organization, they usually just give up.
We don’t have some commission or some body which would like enforce teams and players to keep respecting what they sign. That’s the huge problem in esports. Like we don’t have DFAR or UEFA or something like that like in football. We don’t have the equivalent in esports. And the same can be said for tournament organizers who don’t really pay out the money.”
The situation with BLEED was no different. Players and the organization severed ties following disputes over delayed payments. Multiple employees issued notices, only to report that the organization was being unresponsive and dishonest. Dejan later addressed the matter, providing BLEED’s side of the story.
“Well, for Bleed, I mean, I cannot dispute that there were some problems with payments. It was something like the banks in Singapore, which were flagging gaming as illegal gambling, that’s how I understood from our HR.
And yes, there were some problems, but it was not like that organization didn’t have the money. And, yes, payments were laid several times. I don’t think Kassad lied for anything in his statements, but on the other hand, it could be resolved one way or another, let’s say peacefully, not publicly, but it’s like he’s right to do that.”
Valve hasn’t done much to help in situations like this, which is why the need for a proper regulatory body in esports cannot be overstated. ESIC, the closest thing to one, has its own share of problems. But that’s a discussion for another article, and I want to keep it that way. While in this article we understood how player contracts work and while we talked about the turmoil in tier-two and why a governing body is needed, we were barely scratching the surface. That is why in the upcoming articles which I have planned I’ll dive deeper into ESIC, match-fixing, cheating, and share more insights from my conversation with The Esports Attorney. There is a lot more to it.
