ESL has gone and banned the YouPorn eSports team from any and all competitions due to the nature of their sponsor. The fact YouPorn is their sponsor and ESL is flexing their rules about prohibiting any pornographic content. The team and their sponsor is not work safe or family friendly and thus providing a way to cleanse the image of ESL. The team has made a series of appeals to the ESL and have offered to rebrand their team to have no association with both the website in question. ESL has instead stuck to their ban and removed Team YP from any future events.
ESL spoke to GamesBeat about the decision and provided comment about it:
“Advertising pornography is not legal in the markets we operate in, and the vast majority of partners we’re working with have strict ‘no drugs, no alcohol, no pornography’ rules that we’ve contractually taken on board. These aren’t new rules but ones that have been in our rulebooks for a long time. We have spoken to Team YP manager earlier this year, and in that conversation we’ve explained the situation and rules in detail and offered to look for potential alternatives in a bigger group. At the same time, we’re consulting with our legal teams about this. We will inform the team and the management as soon as we have any updates.”
This will be a hindrance to the entire team and we hope it isn’t something that will end up splitting the team up.
https://twitter.com/TeamYPOfficial/status/723935513497985025?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
“The ESL ban impacts many players on our roster, including those on our Rainbow Six: Siege (former Evolve team), StarCraft 2 and Mortal Kombat X teams, and makes our planned expansion into other branches of e-sports extremely difficult,” Claire Fisher, Team YP in an interview with CBC News.
“We hope for the players and fans’ sake that this gets resolved sooner rather than later, but based on our latest correspondence, in which they declined our offer to rebrand the team, we’re not optimistic.”
https://twitter.com/TeamYPOfficial/status/723936299665727488?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
This isn’t the first time that Team YP has faced some heat about their name. In December of 2015, Capcom would not allow two of Team YP’s players to wear their team jersey at the Capcom Pro Tour stream. This in turn, made the entire team censor their logo during the stream.
Hoepfully, this will be resolved soon, as their sponsor isn’t anything more than that, and has no bearing on who they are or how they play during these events.
