I think if anyone has issues with this, they ought to question why TL or any other org participated in this tournament in the first place. By being involved in any way, they’re all complicit in tolerating the unethical practices of Saudi Arabia, in exchange for financial gain. Team Spirit could give every dollar they earned in winnings from this tournament to charity and they’d still be guilty of playing for this dirty money.
It’s an uncomfortable truth to think about, and that extends to the esports scene at large with the increasing reliance on betting as the main influx of money, so I think calling TL out here for hypocrisy is in itself a red herring that pulls attention away from the bigger, more sinister and insidious problem of an unethical esports structure.
It’s interesting in a way, because Team Liquid is the only one that did a kind of “we have problems with this but we also want the money”, which is objectively better than just being completely quiet. Yet they are called out more because of it.
I mean it could be argued that by revealing this “scheme”, the TL org can no longer be trusted with any public statements it’s made. They seemed to portray themselves as taking the moral high ground but were actually straight up dishonest about their intentions. The hypocrisy is one things to consider, but I think the bigger issue that doesn’t sit well with people has to do with integrity, and the question is if they’re content with trying to fool their followers this way, couldn’t and wouldn’t they have misled and lied to these followers before? For how long? Were the management of this org morally bankrupt the whole time?
The same could be asked of the other orgs, but they didn’t open themselves up to scrutiny the way TL did.
It is a much bigger issue with the modern capitalism, dota is not the only place, the entire Europe and their politics is being more and more influenced by oil money. The issue is, this is not a thing you fight alone, when you need money you go where the money goes, for me, criticize TL here is the same to criticize an random worker of weapon industry, he is still a worker that need a job.
For TL it would cost a lot of their brand to not go to Riyadh that also could affect them in other tournaments (ESL is also oil money). Don’t blame the player, blame the game. And imo It is cool they stated their point publicly.
