Gaming’s audience now surpasses that of film, music, and television combined. In Scotland, you can pursue an esports qualification in over 50 secondary schools and colleges. A national governing body exists. A council has written esports into its official sports strategy. And yet Sport Scotland still doesn’t fund it the way it funds badminton.
That gap — between cultural reality and institutional recognition — was the thread running through a recent Esports Trade Association panel on building regional esports ecosystems, featuring Mark McCready, CEO of Scottish Esports, and Euan Jardine, leader of Scottish Borders Council. Their conversation was less a celebration of how far Scotland has come and more an honest account of how much deliberate, unglamorous work it takes to make an ecosystem real.
McCready came up through the grassroots. He started running tournaments as a university student in Edinburgh, built a club, volunteered with national organizations, worked for British Esports as their Scottish liaison, and eventually concluded that Scotland needed something of its own — a national body that understood the specific dynamics, communities, and legal standards of the Scottish market. He launched Scottish Esports just over a year ago and has spent most of that time doing work that will never trend on social media: safeguarding frameworks, codes of conduct, data protection policies, club development templates. “I wouldn’t have sped anything up,” he said, “purely because we’re trying to do it the right way.”
Jardine arrived at esports from an entirely different direction. In a previous management role, he interviewed a young man with no qualifications who mentioned, almost as an aside, that he was one of the best Counter-Strike players in Europe. Jardine pushed him on it. The candidate explained how his team spent two hours after every match breaking down roles, tactics, and communication — with teammates spread across Europe he’d never met in person. “You don’t understand,” Jardine told him, “that this is a skill set we need in this company.” He hired him. Then he went home and started paying attention to esports. He watched Bugha win the Fortnite World Cup at Arthur Ashe Stadium and realized the world had moved somewhere he hadn’t been looking.
What followed was a years-long effort to drag institutional Scotland in the same direction. Jardine worked with a local teacher named Paul Graham to pilot esports as part of an “Inspired Learning” program in Selkirk — positioned not as gaming, but as future-facing education. One student at that pilot had no qualifications and was regularly skipping class. The esports club gave him a reason to be there. Attendance came first, then engagement, then grades. The BBC covered it. Jardine used that story, and others like it, to make the case at every level he could reach — eventually helping make Scottish Borders what he believes is the first council in Scotland to formally include esports in its sports and physical activity strategy, alongside football, rugby, and badminton.
The education infrastructure is catching up. Scotland’s approach has moved differently from England’s, where the BTEC qualification launched at college level and gradually filtered down into schools. In Scotland, schools came first. The NPA Esports qualification — bite-sized enough to sit alongside a student’s standard academic subjects — is now running in over 50 centers. A degree pathway is in development. YMCA Scotland has embedded esports through youth clubs, with players recently competing in European qualifiers. By the end of this year, a young person in Scotland will be able to follow a continuous pathway from primary school Minecraft competitions through to further and higher education, with community clubs bridging the gaps in between.
The harder problem is political. Both McCready and Jardine are frank about it. Scotland’s National Game Strategy was recently put forward as a motion to be debated in the Scottish Parliament — a development McCready sees as significant, given how long gaming has driven enormous cultural engagement with essentially no formal government acknowledgment. But awareness and funding are different things. “There can’t be any more question marks around it,” Jardine said. Getting esports onto Sport Scotland’s list means getting the right voices in front of the right people, repeatedly, until the misconceptions dissolve. Jardine noted, without naming names, that one council colleague had never heard of Netflix. Esports didn’t stand a chance in that room.
What gives both men confidence isn’t momentum from the top — it’s the density of what’s been built from the bottom. The collaboration between educators, youth workers, local government, and club organizers is, McCready argues, the actual foundation. No single institution is driving it; everyone is pulling from their corner. That distributed ownership, slow as it sometimes feels, is also what makes it durable. Scotland isn’t waiting for a governing body to hand it an ecosystem. It’s building one, carefully, from the places where it already exists.
