RFRSH Entertainment and global agency Lagardère Sports have agreed to ‘extend and adapt’ their current partnership, which sees Lagardère Sports becoming the company’s exclusive Partnership Sales House.
The partnership entails all sales promotion around the global CS:GO tournament BLAST Pro Series, which has dates in Copenhagen and now Istanbul for the first time. This also covers the two esports teams managed and operated by RFRSH; Astralis and Heroic.
The partnership between the two companies began back in 2017 for the BLAST Pro Series that year. BLAST Pro Series is a six-team, single-day CS:GO tournament series which will be Istanbul’s first major event of this type when it takes place in June this year.
Jakob Lund Kristensen, Co-Founder and EVP of Sales at RFRSH Entertainment, commented: ”We are very pleased about the partnership with Lagardère Sports on the sales side. RFRSH Entertainment has built a unique position through the way we produce, operate and communicate around our tournaments and teams.
“We invest significant resources in building and developing properties catering for both the hard core fan, but also, and to a much larger extent than anybody else, to the vast mainstream audience and fans of competitive entertainment in general. In this connection, Lagardère Sports and RFRSH is a perfect match, and we really look forward to taking full advantage of Lagardère Sports’ expertise in Partnership and Media sales.”
Lund Kristensen recently came to speak at our own ESI Super Forum, a one day event focused on the crossover of sports and esports, which we held at Stamford Bridge on March 22nd. RFRSH is set to open an office in London in the near future, and we discussed the company’s expansion plans, brands in esports and more below:
Dr. Nicolas Gaede, Senior Vice President Esports at Lagardère Sports, had this to say of the partnership: “We’re thrilled about this next step within our partnership with RFRSH Entertainment, because it is the product of a great process: We started off with our initial collaboration focused on media distribution in 2017 and since than we have established a truly valuable and trusting partnership which we enlarge and enrich to the next level now.
“Moreover, I am particularly excited about our involvement around the BLAST Pro Series, because this project is a promising and highly appealing next step regarding the combination of entertainment and action-packed sport. Fans, rights holders, brands, the esports industry itself and the interested mainstream audience – everybody benefits from this high quality format.”
Esports Insider says: Lagardère Sports is a huge sporting agency which has been doing some great work in esports with the likes of Unicorns of Love, SK Gaming and more. The expansion and extension of this agreement makes sense for RFRSH and will mean they can focus less on the commercial side and more on the delivery of more top range CS:GO tournaments, and the operations of Astralis and Heroic.