Esports World Cup: Level Up
By Jason Delgado
June 23, 2025
Unless we’re talking about golf or bowling, most sports require an extreme amount of physical exertion. Well, now you can add Esports to the list of sports that are more mind over matter, and it’s sweeping not just the country, but the world. Filmmaker R.J. Cutler’s five-part documentary series Esports World Cup: Level Up gives viewers a peek behind the curtain of the very first Esports World Cup (EWC) in Saudi Arabia.
The docuseries showcases not only the intense international gaming tournament, where teams compete over twenty different games with a million-dollar team prize on the line, but also, like the Olympics, focuses on the human stories of the competitors. In episode one, we meet Soka, a Tongan expert player from San Mateo, California. His father wanted him to quit gaming and play a “real” sport like football, that is, until his son started raking in the money. Life wasn’t easy for Soka growing up due to his dad being in and out of jail, but he overcame that obstacle to be recruited to be a team leader for the number one ranked Esports team in the world, Team Falcons.
Soka is brash and loud, like his father and mother, with the entire household shouting while the two men play each other an intense game of the classic ’90s sensation Street Fighter 2. It’s the opposite of the typical nerdy and introverted gamer stereotype. Soka is quite confident in himself and isn’t shy to talk about it, which is standard for most top conventional athletes, like Kobe or Michael Jordan, who use that “killer” mentality in order to gain an edge over opponents. The gamer Faker is said in the documentary to have the same kind of psychological edge due to his legendary play, and we witness that bear to fruition during the tournament.
“…teams compete over twenty different games with a million-dollar team prize on the line…”
The next episode features Team Liquid, which has a gay leader, so he remotely works with his team rather than face the LGBTQ scrutiny in Saudi Arabia. Liquid received a lot of online hate for participating in the games, so they decided to make a statement by adding the Pride colors to their team jersey. This diversity theme does not overtake the whole episode, but it is something interesting to add to it all. So is the episode that features a Ukrainian team, which makes note of their conflict with Russia, and how they used to have a team made up of seventy percent Russians, but no longer have any for obvious reasons.
We’re told at the beginning of Esports World Cup: Level Up that gaming is a bigger industry worldwide than film and music combined. It’s a youth sport that is growing rapidly, and Saudi Arabia is the first country to make it a grand spectacle like other big sports, with fireworks, stadiums, announcers, and all of the pomp and circumstance, which can make these things fun.
I’m an old-school gamer who doesn’t play anymore, but this series is fun to watch because of the competitive nature of the subjects, and even more so from hearing about their backstories. R.J. Cutler does a fantastic job of weaving the gameplay and stories together, so that fans of games such as League of Legends and Call of Duty, as well as non-gamers such as myself, will still enjoy the universal appeal of it all the same.
