On Tuesday, I went to the Danish provincial city of Vejle for the third or fourth time in a month. Vejle is taking over my life!

Vejle is a vibrant city, being the commercial power center in the south-eastern part of Jutland. But still, why do I visit a town of 75,000 people four times in a month? Well, it is all about sports. My partner in the Riis-Seier Project cycling business, Bjarne Riis, has been close to Vejle for a long time, and by coincidence, our new cycling team, the Continental Team VirtuPro-VeloConcept is also based in the area.

But Tuesday, it was about something completely different. I had tried to keep people and journalists guessing by just giving advance notice that on August 16 I would announce a new sports investment – in Vejle… So of course many guessed that it was somehow cycling related.

Well, it wasn’t.

A few months ago, I received a proposal from one of Denmark’s best eSport teams, Tricked. I was intrigued, in part because one of my good friends, Tommy Ahlers, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, recently invested in another top team, Astralis.

And when I looked more into the eSport space, I was quite astonished at what I found. Hundreds of millions of players and fans, big money tournaments, and not least, a highly professional approach to treating the games as a sport, just like what we know from more traditional disciplines and actors. There is real money involved, with a recent Dota tournament rewarding the winners with nearly 10 million dollars. I know a few traditional sports where this would be unheard of.

While I guess computer games cannot yet be categorized as virtual reality in the normal sense, clearly it has overlaps and is going in that direction. Ever more like the real world experiences. And that seems to fit well with my increasing interest and involvement in this area.

What do I like about Tricked? Well, it is Denmarks largest eSport organisations, competing in four different games and doing some serious talent work. Tricked participates in CounterStrike, Call of Duty, League of Legends and Fifa 16, the football game, where we have the current world champion, Al-Bacha. For an idea of how that works, see the exciting 2016 world cup final here.

Tricked has a great cooperation with Campus Vejle, a combined sports and business college, with education for promising footballers, cyclists, riding talents – and around 90 eSport students! I like the responsible attitude towards making sure the young talents don’t just develop their skills, but get an education at the same time. In the old days, too many talents got into trouble if their sporting dreams failed to materialize and they were left with nothing – no career, no education and no future. Given how unpredicatable sport as a career is, I find this educational aspect very important.

So, a question I have been asked more than once…. Is this really sport? Well, I think so.

As they say…. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

And we are talking about a sport, where the participants train hard physically and mentally, take part in heavily followed competitions with big cash prizes, have millions of fans and followers, attract significant sponsors and get paid a salary and transfer sums to join a top team. We are beginning to see other, more traditional, sports teams getting involved – Bayern Munich and Manchester City, e.g. building Fifa 16 exposure.

I asked my sports advisor in Seier Capital, Bjarne Riis, to come along for the Tricked launch, and he was very excited about the prospects for helping the players communicate better, work together as a team and create greater focus. As Bjarne is one of the world’s foremost experts and practitioners in these disciplines, of course the players at Tricked were equally excited about getting access to such competencies.

So yes, this is real sport. The mainstream media and traditional investors have not quite reached this understanding fully. But I happily predict that this will change very soon. And I am happy to be at the forefront of this development!