Analyzing esports with sports as a reference can help better understand the size of the industry, and hence economic impact, as well as the scope of appeal to viewers. This chapter provides a comparison of sports to esports for professional sports leagues and major esports leagues along three key dimensions: industry size, viewer friendliness, and game competitiveness. For industry size, sports are larger for revenue and salaries, but esports is larger for prize pools. For viewers, sports' championship FIFA World Cup and the NFL Super Bowl dwarf all others for viewers, but the esport League of Legends World championship has about 3x more viewers than any other sporting event. For viewer friendliness, esports are slightly more complex than sports, although both have a comparable number of roles, positions and special cases. For competitiveness, esports are more competitive than sports considering point-based metrics that account for team leads over the course of a game.

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