Excel World Cup: ESPN broadcasts Excel All-Star Battle

The sports channel ESPN has surprised with the broadcast of a special e-sports tournament: it is about the Microsoft Excel All-Star Battle, the world championships for spreadsheets. Esports isn’t just for shooters and real-time strategy games.

And no, that’s not a joke, the athletes, organizers, and broadcaster ESPN took it very seriously and made it a very exciting event. The Microsoft Excel All-Star Battle is an established esports competition that has now received a lot of media attention since ESPN aired a competition in May of this year. In three rounds, the participants were given extremely complicated tasks that they had to solve in their spreadsheets within 30 minutes. As TechRadar reported, Excel E-Sports has gained a lot of new fans from this broadcast since last weekend. Infographic: eSport pays off

Festival of crazy sports

The event was from World Cup Financial Models (FMWC), “a premier financial modeling competition for anyone interested in finance,” and aired on ESPN’s “The Ocho” in early August. The Ocho is a 24-hour festival of crazy sports, including corgi racing, ax throwing, and rock jumping. The Excel All-Star Battle is now gearing up for the next big event. The grand final will take place in November and the preliminary rounds will start soon. The unanimous opinion of all viewers was: That excel-E-Sports is a lot of fun to watch. You can cheer and wonder what you can do with Excel and how quickly the professionals use this comprehensive tool.

There was also a moderation, commentary provided by Bill Jelen, aka Mr. Excel, who is the author of over 40 Excel books, and Oz Du Soleil, who is co-author of a number of Excel books and runs the Excel On Fire YouTube channel. The next matches will start in October with the FMWC Open. Then the best 128 participants will be selected, who have to work their way up to the final on November 12. By the way, last year there was a $10,000 prize for the best Excel athlete.