Gamereactor recently attended Liverpool FC's Anfield stadium for the PES League's Road to Cardiff regional final, and during our time there we spoke with Konami's senior director of brand & business development Jonas Lygaard about the league, and the event itself.
When we asked about the importance of Anfield as a venue Lygaard said: "It's really important for us, it's a great pleasure for us to be here, having the opportunity to work with a club like Liverpool. Liverpool Football Club has a fantastic history, [Anfield is] an iconic stadium, and for us to be able to partner with a club like that and also being able to [collaborate] with the club in a way that we're doing, and to see the support that we're getting from the team now being in a situation where we have a PES League event, we have the second regional final at Anfield is a great pleasure for us."
We also asked about the lessons learned between Seasons 1 and 2 "We learned a lot from Season 1 and you can probably see a lot from how we're streaming," he said. "There have been some learnings [...] as a simple thing, with the players now they're wearing jackets because where we have this competition is in an area which is slightly cold, so we needed to bring jackets in to make sure that they're branded properly, instead of them being in a random sweatshirt. So that's one change, we have changed the way they are dressed."
"Another [area] we have changed as well is the way that we are streaming it. So we basically want to be live all the time instead of chopping it up, and have more post-match interviews as well, making sure that we're creating more content during the event as well, not just having the games. But there's still things that we can learn and things that we can do even better for the next competition that we have. It's a nice way of evolving from where we started. I don't know if you saw our Milan event, the world final last year - that was a completely different scale [from] where we are this season here, and then how we have evolved from the Barcelona event and now this Anfield event has again taken a major step. And all of these learnings that we have from this Anfield event we will take it to the next event."
Where would you like to see the PES League go in the future?