Sachsenmeister will be chosen until the end of January and will be eligible for the DFB E-Cup
The ball rolls again. Not on the real lawn, but at least virtually: on Wednesday the Saxon Football Association will give the go-ahead for its national association trophy in e-football. Back in spring, during the first lockdown, the SFV organized an online soccer tournament with the Finish-It-Cup. The difference: While it was a self-contained event at the time, this time the winner qualifies for the DFB-E-Pokal, the official Fifa cup event of the German Football Association.
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While 200 players were sitting in front of their home game consoles at the first tournament, this time only 64 will start, 56 of them on the Playstation, the rest on the Xbox. One explanation for the decline is at least partly due to the tightened access conditions, explains organizer Chris Rohde from the SFV. When registering, every participant had to submit a verification from the club for which he was competing. “After the experiences from the IT Cup, we stayed tough this time.” Back then, some unverified players would have turned out to be bad losers. “Something like that naturally falls back on the club, which knew nothing about the participation of the actors concerned.”
For Alexander Thost from FSV Zwönitz, the low participation also has other reasons. “The matter was not well communicated. We only found out about the tournament after the registration period had expired.” Instead of a quartet like in the spring, the district league team only enters the race with one fighter: Marvin Rintschwentner wants to get back to at least the quarter-finals – in the Finish-It-Cup he failed there because of the eventual tournament winner Ben Kettenbeil (SV Eintracht Leipzig-Süd).
In addition to the FSV Zwönitz, the FV Preßnitztal and the ISG statutes are also represented from the Ore Mountains. The latter has a trio at the start with Tobias Hesse, Florian Hofrichter and Marvin Fietz, of which only Hesse is actually active in the second of the Kreisliga Ost. The nominally strongest e-soccer player, Florian Hofrichter (photo), instead kicks off with rivals in Mildenau. “He is also otherwise very active in esports and should definitely be among the top 32,” predicts Tobias Hesse, who thinks online football is a nice pastime – but nothing more: “I am against that to be called a sport. “
The game is played with Fifa 21 – in the so-called 90s mode. In this, all teams have the same level of play – victory or defeat actually depends on the performance of the e-athletes. However, according to a requirement of the DFB, they are only allowed to vote for teams from Germany and must then send a screenshot to the organizer to confirm the result. According to Chris Rohde, a football association can no longer afford to ignore the topic of e-sports these days. In this respect, the implementation of the tournaments has nothing to do with Corona. “They would have happened that way. However, not completely online,” he says. “A Final Four tournament was planned for the end of January at a central location, for which we had even rented the space.”
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