ESL has banned the YouPorn sponsored pro team

YouPorn has made a big point of trying to ingratiate its services and brand with more mainstream culture. Considering how some countries and politicians love to blame porn from everything from sexual delinquency, to violence, changing society’s attitude to it is probably a smart plan for the company.

One of its more recent moves to do so, was to sponsor its very own Esports team, Team YP. While that team quickly disappeared, a number of similar teams focusing on different games appeared a few months later, but now they too could be set to never play a single pro game.

The Electronics Sports League, known as ESL, has banned them from competing, because of the affiliation with the pornography site.

“Advertising pornography is not legal in the markets we operate in,” ESL said in a statement to VentureBeat, “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 obviously makes things rather hard for Team YP to compete and grow as a team, which may mean it doesn’t have much of a future.

If that’s the case, it goes to show that perhaps these sorts of leagues have too much power, when a ban based on a relatively arbitrary reasoning can affect the life of a team so much.

What do you think of this move?