Dominating the Electronic Pitch

St. Louis City SC already has one of the top soccer players in the world, but he won’t be on the field

BY BENJAMIN SIMON

In June 2022, the brass for CITY SC held an intervention. Something wasn’t working.

The problem, though, had nothing to do with the field. It had to do with eMLS, the American virtual soccer league. CITY SC had had an eMLS player since 2020, but he wasn’t winning. And the front office needed to know why.

“What [does] eMLS mean to the club moving forward? And how are we going to approach it and get into a winning position?”

Peter Wood, vice president of creative and content for CITY SC, remembers people asking. Wood didn’t just want to host an eMLS team for fun. He wanted to win. Although teams don’t need an eMLS player, nearly every team has one. Some have two. LA United even has three.

During the meetings, Wood explained the virtues: Signing an eMLS player elevates the entire program.

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Esports as an industry is on pace to break $1 billion in revenue, according to Insider Intelligence, and FIFA is only gaining steam. In its first seven days of availability, FIFA 23 surpassed 10 million players. There are virtual leagues tied to professional leagues across the world in Europe, Africa and Australia. Major League Soccer in America started its league in 2018.

Millions of people watch these games. Twitch streams of the eMLS League Series 2 tournament in February drew nearly 500,000 viewers. The 2022 eChampions League final received nearly 5 million views on Youtube.

Wood knew that a good eMLS player wouldn’t only be fun — the person could bring more eyes, money and energy to the entire organization.

“When you have a winning player on your team, it lifts the whole club,” Wood says. “Everybody gets excited about it. The players get behind it. It brings a lot of pride to the city.”

The brass listened. They gave Wood the go-ahead. Get who you want, they said. So Wood started doing research, Twitter DMing different players, studying records, scouring past games and scheduling multiple interviews.

That’s when he found Niklas Raseck, a 24-year-old esports FIFA player who had never visited St. Louis, who resided in Germany, who had won multiple international tournaments, qualified for the FIFA World Cup three times and earned more than $215,000 in prize winnings during his career.

In short, CITY SC signed one of the best virtual soccer players on the planet.

Wood was drawn by Raseck’s success on a global scale, in big games, in front of live crowds. (He’s “somebody that’s got that winning mentality ingrained in them. Niklas isn’t here to participate. He wants to win competitions for St. Louis.”) Wood was drawn to his playing style. (“Niklas’ style was very similar to [CITY SC]. He’s a real brute when he gets behind the controller. He wants to attack, attack, attack.”)

But Wood interviewed plenty of talented players. What stood out was how little Raseck talked about his skills.

“He’s a very humble guy,” Wood says.

Raseck, who goes by NRaseck7 and NR7, spoke to the RFT via phone from New York City in late January, just hours from his first tournament with CITY SC. The stakes are high. Raseck, the first European to play in eMLS, is tasked with reviving the team’s eMLS program.

But this doesn’t seem to phase Raseck. He is calm over the phone, soft-spoken and quiet, as if he has answered questions and prepared for tournaments many times.

“I didn’t really plan to get into it. It just, like … ” he says, pausing, “happened to be my job at some point.”

Raseck grew up in Recklinghausen, a German city with more than 114,000 people. He was a solid goalie — until he broke his arm at 13 and found himself play- ing video games more frequently.

“I realized that I was getting better at the game,” he says.

Getting better is an understatement. At 14, he signed up for a FIFA tournament: the national German championship.

Raseck, somehow, someway, reached the semi-finals.

“That’s how it all started for me,” he says.

Still, he didn’t plan to become a professional FIFA player. He wanted to attend college. But he kept winning. Two years later, Raseck captured the 2016 German FIFA championship. That same year, he signed his first professional contract and flew to New York City. A year after graduat- ing from high school, in 2019, he won the FIFA Ultimate Team 20 Champions Cup. In 2021, he was a finalist for Globe Soccer Awards esports player of the year.

As he kept winning, it was time for a change.

In October, after two months of vetting, CITY SC officially announced that it had signed Raseck as its eMLS player for the 2022 season. The year started in January with League Series 1 and League Series 2 in February. The two tournaments lead up to the championship, the eMLS Cup, from March 11 to 12, where Raseck will enter as the four seed out of 26 players.

“This year my plan is obviously to bring a trophy home to St. Louis,” he says.

But he also has a larger goal in sight, the grand prize of them all.

“The big goal from everyone,” he says, “is to win a [FIFAe] World Cup.”

Raseck still lives in Germany with his parents, and he commutes to America for tournaments. But Raseck doesn’t fly across the world, click some buttons and magically finish in first place. Video games are his full-time job.

Raseck spends at least five hours every day playing FIFA in his work office, which features a PC, PS5 and three monitors. When he’s done, he rewatches the games, analyzes them and looks for errors. He tries not to practice more because it could hurt his performance.

“I’m really careful with it because at some point if you play too much, you [overplay], and that can be really bad for creativity in the attack,” he says.

When Wood first started working with professional video gamers, he was floored by the amount of preparation necessary.

“I didn’t really understand the dedication that goes into being a top-level gamer,” Wood says.

In late January, Wood flew out to New York to meet Raseck and watch him compete. He watched the players smash away at their controllers, just inches away from their computer screens — until, bam, in a matter of milliseconds, a defensive player slides just a step late and the ball drops in the goal, and one player screams in triumph while the other player’s head drops in defeat.

“It almost gave me a heart attack,” he says.

Watching these games, Wood felt the weight of the sport. This isn’t just a video game. These are athletes, just like the rest of CITY SC.