When the Philadelphia Fusion plays, the team president, Tucker Roberts, loves to stay in the dugout with the coaches and bench players. He hangs obtainable so long as the crew is prevailing. But if matters start to move poorly, he heads onto the area floor to pace some fans banging on inflatable thunder sticks. If that doesn’t help, and a loss feels impending, Roberts parks himself in a backroom, after the Fusion’s social media editors, who’re crafting online films for supporters at domestic.
“It’s primary feng shui,” Roberts says. “If your surroundings aren’t running for you, you need to change it.”
He feels the mix of restlessness, bile, and foreboding would be acquainted with the proprietors of pro football and basketball teams. But no matter his family’s brilliant wealth—Roberts’s father is chairman and leader executive officer of Comcast Corp., the cable large that owns NBCUniversal and the NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers, among other companies—his angst isn’t tied up with the fortunes of a significant sports activities team. Fusion gamers compete in Overwatch, a frenetic online game, an e-recreation. Squads of professionals (six in step with facet) launch grenades and blast cannons at each other, counting kills and respawning as well needed. During video games, gamers put on brief-sleeve jerseys—orange-on-black for home games, orange-on-white for away—with their nicknames at the back. If bowling shirts nevertheless exist inside the twenty-second century, they’ll appear to be these.
The Fusion’s roster is stacked with expertise from Europe and e-sports powerhouse South Korea. Despite missing the remaining preseason yr because several players had visa troubles, the crew almost won the championship, losing within the finals to the London Spitfire. “We got here in with expectations that were, like, Let’s just get a few wins, allows not try to make the playoffs,” Roberts says. “And then as soon as we got there, it turned into like we were playing with house cash.” During the offseason, he beefed up the group’s education staff inside the hopes of creating any other playoff run.
Years ago, Comcast’s choice to pay a $20 million franchise rate via its Comcast Spectacor department to begin the Fusion became the primary of numerous massive e-sports bets wherein Roberts played a role. In February, he and Park Jung-Ho, CEO of South Korean mobile smartphone giant SK Telecom Co., introduced they have been forming a venture to discipline groups an excellent way to play Fortnite, and Overwatch competitor, amongst different titles. Then in March, Comcast found out plans to construct a $50 million area for the Fusion in South Philadelphia. With a planned capacity of three 500 fanatics, it will function as a sister arena to the 20,000-seat Wells Fargo Center that Comcast already owns, on the way to host this yr’s Overwatch championship. Architectural renderings advise the indoors will function many monitors.
Roberts, tall, skinny, and athletic, also lately began courting Olivia Munn, an actress. The latter has a cult following amongst game enthusiasts from her days as a host on the now-defunct online game TV community G4. Roberts gained’t communicates about the relationship except to say that he admires Munn’s business acumen. “She invested early in Uber and Wag,” a dog-walking app, he says.
The idea of building a protracted-time period corporation around human beings looking at other human beings play video games is no positive component. Still, Comcast isn’t on my own in its enthusiasm. The prize money in e-sports can attain millions of greenbacks, and researcher Newzoo BV expects typical sales to climb 27% this year, to $1.1 billion, thanks to expanded ticket income, company sponsorships, and media rights offers. (Comcast is presently thinking about suggestions for naming rights for Fusion Arena.) Among the new proprietors of video game teams: basketball exquisite Michael Jordan, Dallas Cowboys proprietor Jerry Jones, and Atlanta’s Cox Communications.
When Roberts became developing up in Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill neighborhood, his dad’s organization, then a local cable service, became almost universally recognized, if now not precisely liked. “Having a nightmare Comcast tale is nearly a residency requirement in this town,” Philadelphia mag once wrote. Neighborhood service centers were seen as crucibles of human frustration in which emotionless representatives confronted consumer meltdowns from behind limitations of bulletproof glass.
It won’t be sudden than that Tucker—whose full call is Brian Leon Tucker Roberts Jr.—immersed himself in galaxies away, far away. He examined Harry Potter novels and played games. Brian Sr. Took the eight-year-antique Tucker to the King of Prussia Mall for a Pokémon event. He superior five rounds earlier than coming up in opposition to a 28-yr-vintage rival who, as Tucker remembers it, turned into than getting a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. Tucker cried when he lost.
In middle college, Roberts became obsessed with a web sport called Star Wars Galaxies. He performed as Key Ekips, a Zabrak bounty hunter, on the Scylla server and ultimately joined a guild. Over time he helped build cities on Tatooine and Naboo, a planet within the Chommell sector. Along with the manner, he made some friends. “I’m placing out with a bunch of 30-12 months-olds who are some German dudes, and that they don’t realize I’m thirteen, and that they’re simply treating me like some other man or woman,” Roberts says. Nobody is aware of the internet if you’re the inheritor to an omnivorous cable empire.
Escaping the own family shadow was a bit more complicated in a university. Like his father and grandfather, Roberts attended the University of Pennsylvania, in which he studied business. On-campus on the time, college officers had been simply completing the creation of the Roberts Proton Therapy Center, a seventy five,000-square-foot most cancers-remedy facility, supported by his circle of relatives’s philanthropy.
