Probably not like you're thinking. ESPN already has picked up esports and typically the esports tourneys don't overlap with major sports events. This is likely

Probably not like you're thinking. ESPN already has picked up esports and typically the esports tourneys don't overlap with major sports events. This is likely a conscious decision on the part of Riot, Valve, and so on, to ensure they're not competing with audiences. ESPN has tried to adapt to esports, but it met resistance from its audience and its own commentators not really accepting it. There was this famous career ending rants [1] that is just one of many from the ESPN commentators - viewer comments usually don't stray too far from such thoughts. esports fans seem pretty distinct from the core fans of ESPN, and ESPN deciding to cover it on their sub-channels (ESPN2, etc) is their attempt to reach out to those numbers and to get eyes on the channel. The internal rejection of esports doesn't help at all for ESPN who I'm sure is dying for the kinds of numbers that the Twitch and Youtube events get, especially since there is so much down-time between matches with virtually no advertisements, which likely makes the business side of ESPN wince quite a bit. But no, I don't think esports is causing problems for ESPN in the sense that it's cutting in; ESPN would be HAPPY to get on the esports train if they could. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzL21gHwt1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzL21gHwt1I