Do National Team Wins in eSports Tournaments Increase the Player Base?

- A Quasi-Experimental Approach -

Abstract

International sporting events are widely reported when good results are achieved under the auspices of government and business support, pointing to an increase in the sporting population. However, empirical studies of this causal relationship are limited. This study quantitatively examines the effect of national team performance on the playing population for e-sports. We use the difference-in-differences method, which takes advantage of the unpredictability of athletes' performance as a quasi-experiment and exploits differences in the playing population between countries that performed well and those that did not. We used data from Google Trends as a proxy measure of playing population. The analysis revealed that a national team win increased the player population by approximately 10%, but the effect disappeared after 20 days. This study contributes to the policy, research, and business communities as a rare empirical finding on sports populations.