A new type of competition combines traditional sports with their digital versions
A phygital football competition has just ended in Russia’s city of Kazan. This new form of competition combines a traditional football game with a video game version of the sport. Victory goes to the team that achieves the highest combined score in both disciplines.
The competition is part of a larger tournament dubbed Phygital Games 10 being held Kazan and running from October 5 to 22. This is the largest such event to date, according to its organizers. In addition to football, it involves phygital basketball and hockey, as well as tactical shooters and even a mobile game.
In the phygital football finale, Moscow-based Lokomotiv faced off against Rotor, another Russian team from the city of Volgograd. The Moscow squad first won the digital game by the score of 6-3 before Rotor took the real-world game. However, Lokomotiv still managed to snatch the victory in the second half of the game on the field by scoring a goal that gave it a smaller margin of defeat than its victory in the digital game.
The win allowed the Moscow team to qualify for the ‘Games of the Future 2024’ – a major international tournament scheduled to take place in Kazan between February 21 and March 3 of next year.
Similar to Phygital Games 10, the Games of the Future 2024 will combine physical and electronic sports and will become the first major international competition of its kind. As many as 260 teams featuring some 2,000 competitors from all over the world are expected to take part. The games will also feature a total of 21 competitions divided into five categories: sports, tactics, strategy, technologies, and speed.
“We are on the path to achieving our goal and expect that the Games of the Future will have participants from more than 100 countries,” the project manager of the Games of the Future, Igor Stolyarov, said earlier in October after the end of the phygital basketball tournament held as part of Phygital Games 10.
During that competition, a Spanish team, Ramboot Esports, defeated Serbian Partizan Esports 37 to 31 to take home the trophy. Third place went to an Azerbaijani team, Alov Basket, which defeated China’s MDMX.
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