Our Athletes Voice series gives athletes a forum to talk about how technology has impacted their careers and their lives away from sports. This week, the New York Red Bulls’ eMLS player, Mike LaBelle, 29, discusses his career path, the upcoming FIFA eWorld Cup, and the in-game celebration named after him.
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When Mike LaBelle received his first media attention for gaming success back in 2007, the headline in the Houston Chronicle described EA Sports’ FIFA game as “thumb soccer.” The word “esports” had been coined as far back as 1999, but was still relatively unknown outside of the gaming community. And competitive gaming was far from a billion-dollar industry.
That Houston Chronicle story appeared when LaBelle was an 18-year-old senior at Hightower High School in Missouri City, Texas. LaBelle now has won multiple national titles in the FIFA series and amassed nearly 300,000 YouTube followers (not to mention another 200,000 on Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram). The FIFA 14 edition of the game even featured a goal celebration he contributed called “Le Cirque LaBelle”—in which one on-screen avatar holds his arms out to the side like a circus hoop, and another player dives through.
Though LaBelle is still an active player—and will compete in the eMLS All-Star Challenge this weekend in Orlando—he is also a regular FIFA analyst and will fill that role for the FIFA eWorld Cup broadcast at the O2 Arena in London on Aug. 2-4. (NYCFC’s Chris Holly is the lone eMLS player to qualify.)
LaBelle played high school and club soccer in the Houston area before attending the University of Akron on an academic scholarship. After his freshman year, he then transferred to Division II McMurray University in Abilene, Texas, to be closer to home. He played a year of college soccer at McMurray before majoring in communications, with a minor in business, at Texas A&M.
Youth Esports…
“I always gravitated towards sports games outside of some of the mainstream titles like Mario, Donkey Kong, or even later on with Halo. But I would say the sports games because I was into sports. As an athlete, it made sense to be able to share or to control the experience of the superstars—your role models.
“When I was in high school, 15 years old, I was always playing FIFA, but that’s when I realized that I felt like I was a lot better than everyone else that I was playing against. This is before online play had blown up. This was before everything had gotten a lot bigger in terms of Twitch, YouTube, Facebook. When I was in high school, I think all we had was MySpace at the time. Facebook was only for college students at the time.
“These options or even having the vision for options of creating content or being a professional gamer really weren’t real. It was underground. Playing video games was definitely not cool, which was fine, but that was just the time period we were in.
“I had a friend who came over with a long Ethernet cord, and I know my parents must have hated this friend because we had a 50-foot, 100-foot cord running through the house. We didn’t have wifi. We were plugging it in direct. Oh, they must have been so mad. ‘Don’t unplug it, don’t unplug it,’ I was yelling. Our game room where I could play video games and where the router was were not close to each other whatsoever. One was downstairs, and one was upstairs.”
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The Growth of Pro Gaming…
“By 17, I had won my first opportunity to really compete. I won the qualifier for the FIFA Interactive World Cup, which is now known as the FIFA eWorld Cup which is the biggest FIFA event in the world. That’s when it got real for my parents because I had two free tickets to go to Amsterdam to compete. That was my first international tournament. I had gone to local tournaments, but this was my first really big international event. I finished top-eight, so I think that was really good.
“Before that, you have to think about it from my parents’ perspective: ‘You’re wasting your time. This isn’t real. No one’s going to fund or pay you. I’m glad you think you’re good at something.’ They encouraged me, but it was a different time period, a different era.
“From there, it became, I would say, a hobby for many, many years until I was getting closer to finishing university, just to fast forward the story. I was always winning tournaments and events, but it was kind of like gambling on yourself because you weren’t guaranteed anything. There weren’t major sponsors, endorsements, partnerships, clubs, organizations. They just weren’t involved yet, at least not heavily involved. They didn’t know where to invest and how to invest properly.
“There were so many things happening, but there just wasn’t really the funding behind it yet. To give you perspective, winning the biggest event in the world at the time was $20,000, which is great, but that’s not where we’re at in present time. If you win the tournament that’s happening in two weeks, it’s $250,000 for first. It’s literally the exact same tournament.”
Applying Soccer Experience to FIFA…
“Understanding the sport correlates strongly with being able to put that together on the virtual pitch. You understand that you’re looking for different triangles of passing, you’re looking for supporting runs, overlapping runs. You have tactical awareness. ‘I want pressure, so this is a good place to double-team or a good time to sit off.’ Understanding angles, understanding corner kicks.
“Even on the base level, if you don’t know the rules—because there are a lot of people who are getting into the sport of soccer via playing FIFA, so for them they’re learning an entire sport via a video game. All of this plays a big factor in understanding how to score goals, have additional possession play, just having general tactical awareness and how to apply it. If you want to compete in anything, I think you have to have that competitive spirit and drive. It’s more than just a level of talent. You have to really want to do it.”
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The 2019 eWorld Cup…
“I think you should expect drama, tension, excitement, a lot of emotion. You grind the entire year to be at that event, and now you’re here and you can control your destiny. It doesn’t really matter what you’ve done prior to that point. There’s going to be favorites, of course—guys who have had many success stories this year—but that doesn’t mean that they’re guaranteed anything at the eWorld Cup. It’s basically a reset.
“I actually think there’s a good chance that we’re going see someone who maybe isn’t a favorite be able to step in that space and make a run for it. And it’s life-changing when you look at that level of money.”
Le Cirque LaBelle…
“It’s incredible. As a kid, that’s kind of your dream—putting a lot of time into your favorite game and then to have any involvement in the game or see yourself in the game is amazing, let alone a celebration that all these people are doing online and don’t even know you.”
“I made a couple videos in consecutive years with celebration suggestions for FIFA installments, and then FIFA actually did a competition saying, ‘Hey, we’re looking to include someone’s celebration in next year’s installment.’ Mind you, I don’t really have a big following or anything at this point, but I was like, ‘Yes, this is exactly what I love to do.’ We didn’t submit a bunch, but we made a bunch of celebrations. Then I waited to see what people online thought of that list of celebrations in terms of what was feasible and what people gravitated towards. That’s how we submitted the Le Cirque LaBelle celebration where a guy is jumping through a hoop.
“It’s incredible. As a kid, that’s kind of your dream—putting a lot of time into your favorite game and then to have any involvement in the game or see yourself in the game is amazing, let alone a celebration that all these people are doing online and don’t even know you. I was there for the motion capture of it in Vancouver, where they create the game. It’s one of those experiences I’ll never forget. I was such a kid at that time.”
eMLS, MLS, and Pro Sports…
“I feel super-blessed and just grateful to be a part of the New York Red Bulls organization and also with eMLS where we’re basically at the forefront of something. We’re at the beginning of competitive gaming, at least within terms of FIFA. We’re at the infancy stage and we’re able to push that. It’s something that was going to happen, in my opinion, regardless at some point, but we’re here from the very beginning. For me, that’s very exciting. That’s an opportunity to really be able to shape something—shape the future, shape the culture, shape what’s happening in competitive gaming.
“Almost everyone on the New York Red Bulls plays FIFA, and I think that’s going to be consistent throughout the league. It’s fun. I kind of feel like FIFA and chill is a real thing where you get together with your friends and maybe play two-on-two and you get to chat and make jokes and team up to score a bunch of goals—or concede a bunch of goals. It’s just become such a part of society, a pop culture movement almost, especially with FIFA and how it translates not just for pro soccer players but other pro athletes.
“I did some coverage for the Steve Nash charity event in New York that happens every year. We were in the green room before going out there and a couple of the NBA guys were like, ‘Hey Mike, I’ve seen your videos. I want to play against you in FIFA.’ So we set up FIFA in the green room and were playing.
“It reaches people. You’d be really surprised how into another sport some athletes are. Same with NFL guys. Everyone plays FIFA more than any other sports game. That’s not an opinion. That’s a fact, in terms of purchasing, consuming content—just number-wise.”
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Read more in our ongoing Athletes Voice series…
- NBA 3-Point Champ Joe Harris: The Sports App I Wish I’d Had as a Kid
- NHL’s Theo Fleury: ‘I’m Involved in the Biggest Epidemic on the Planet’
- Tim Anselimo Survived a Mass Shooting to Return to the NBA 2K League
- Chris Geiler Believes Data Can Save Lives in Skydiving
- Joshua Dobbs Balances Pro Football Career with Aerospace Aspirations
- Kai Lenny Wants to Protect the Monster Waves He Rides
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