Zhang Yuan’s eyes lit up: “Please elaborate, Mr. Pei!”

Pei Qian took a sip of tea and organized his thoughts.

“First, we need to provide standardized contracts for all clubs and players, while strictly prohibiting any dual contracts.”

“The standardized contracts can be either short-term or long-term, but they can only stipulate basic terms like contract duration, penalty fees, transfer fees, and salary. They cannot include miscellaneous clauses that restrict players.”

“In particular, there must be no vague clauses such as ‘Players must unconditionally cooperate with the club’s commercial activities.’ This must be explicitly prohibited.”

“There’s no problem with clubs conducting commercial operations, but these must be under our supervision. They cannot be unrestricted, and they especially cannot exploit players.”

“Second, during each annual transfer period, clubs and free agent players can freely contact each other and make promises, but they cannot sign contracts privately. Before signing, we will arrange for clubs to uniformly bid on free agent players through a silent auction system.”

“During the silent auction, each club will first express their intentions, clearly stating their preferred contract duration, penalty fees, salary, and additional special treatment, such as guaranteed playing time for the player.”

“Once the intentions are confirmed during the silent auction, the player can choose which team they want to join. If both parties agree, they sign the official contract. The promises made during the silent auction must be honored by the clubs without regrets, and we will be responsible for supervision.”

“Finally, in case of disputes, both parties must accept our mediation. We will act as intermediaries, getting players and clubs to compromise and choose solutions acceptable to all three parties.”

“Based on these principles, our DGE Club will only recruit players who are free agents. If players leave while still under contract, transfer fees or penalty fees will be paid according to the minimum standard.”

Zhang Yuan was stunned: “Mr. Pei, isn’t this a bit idealistic? How practical is it?”

“What if clubs don’t accept our standardized contracts? Or if they sign dual contracts in private?”

“What if clubs confirm their intentions and then go back on their word?”

“Contracts between clubs and players have legal effect. Once a dispute arises, clubs can completely bypass us and sue the players, and we can’t control that.”

Pei Qian smiled slightly: “That’s easy to solve.”

“From the beginning, we’ll have written agreements with these clubs stating that if they violate the rules, there will be penalties ranging from fines to competition bans.”

“If these clubs don’t accept our supervision, they won’t be eligible to enter the GOG league. They can withdraw if they want, and we’ll act as intermediaries to buy their GOG divisions and sell them to other clubs interested in entering the GOG league.”

In other words, you don’t have to accept our unified management, but then I won’t let you play.

You can go play other e-sports projects on your own, and I’ll pay to buy your GOG division and sell it to others. I won’t let you suffer actual losses, but as long as you don’t agree to supervision, don’t think about entering this circle.

Pei Qian had three main considerations for establishing these rules.

First, with only standardized contracts and no dual contracts or various additional clauses, clubs couldn’t pull sneaky operations.

Many clubs offered sky-high contracts that weren’t sky-high; there were many tricks involved.

For instance, a common phenomenon was clubs collaborating with streaming platforms, each contributing part of the money, but having requirements for players’ streaming activities, which depleted the players’ future commercial value.

Players seemed to be earning money, but in reality, they might not be.

However, transfer fees were genuinely inflated as a result, which would mean DGE Club would earn more money each time they sold a player than before, and that would be too painful.

So, less trickery and more sincerity from everyone. Inflating transfer fees so high only sounded good, but had no real meaning.

Additionally, DGE Club would only agree to minimum transfer fees, ensuring that DGE Club earned as little as possible from transfer fees.

Second, establishing such a regulatory body would require recruiting a large number of staff, with daily operational expenses being a cost. At the same time, these various regulatory provisions would certainly have a deterrent effect on some clubs.

If clubs didn’t accept and wanted to withdraw, that was also easy to handle. Pei Qian would pay to buy their GOG divisions, ensuring they didn’t lose out. He would compensate all their investments.

But once they left, it wouldn’t be so easy to come back in.

Buying these clubs would cost more money, which was exactly what Pei Qian wanted.

Finally, Pei Qian genuinely had ideas about standardizing the industry and protecting players’ rights.

Without higher-level supervision, players and clubs could never establish equal relationships because the power of discourse was not on the same level.

Just like ordinary workers facing companies, they often could only vote with their feet and choose the least bad company, but they couldn’t negotiate with the company.

Only a very small number of exceptionally outstanding, completely irreplaceable people had negotiating power.

When the two sides were not equal in strength, if the officials did nothing and remained neutral, they were taking sides.

It was like a boxing champion fighting an ordinary person. If a third party remained neutral and didn’t intervene when neither side was clearly at fault, they were effectively letting the ordinary person die.

Therefore, Pei Qian’s regulatory body would objectively protect players’ rights but wouldn’t exploit clubs either. It would just prevent clubs from being greedy and excessively exploiting players.

Clubs would still receive their transfer fees and penalty fees without reduction, and they would still have their commercial contracts, popularity, and influence without any loss. They just couldn’t exploit loopholes and do whatever they wanted.

Pei Qian certainly recognized the spirit of contracts, but this had two prerequisites: First, the contract itself must be fair, not exploitative terms or slave contracts, not built on one party exploiting the other; Second, the spirit of contract didn’t mean contracts could never be violated, but that if violated, one was willing to bear the corresponding consequences.

In short, these regulations would make the DGE Club earn less from transfer fees and reduce some clubs’ capital. After these clubs withdrew, buying their entire GOG divisions would cost more money, which was wonderful!

Moreover, the daily operation of this new regulatory body would also require money, and hiring more people to maintain it would be good too—more salaries could be paid out.

Zhang Yuan had already taken two sheets of paper and was quickly recording what Mr. Pei had said earlier.

But as he carefully reviewed these terms, he felt uncertain.

Would this work?

None of the world’s major leagues seemed to operate this way.

The reason was simple: they didn’t dare or were unwilling to fall out with the big clubs.

Big clubs brought fans, attention, and funds to the league. To be fair, the success of any competition was the result of joint efforts by organizers, sponsors, clubs, professional players, and audiences. Problems would arise if any link were missing.

So even if organizers had the ability, they often didn’t want to offend these big clubs. Even if a club was exploiting players, as long as it wasn’t too extreme and causing public outrage, they would usually slap both sides on the wrist and let the matter drop.

After all, in most cases, a player was replaceable and sacrificable, while the loss caused by a big club leaving was difficult to make up for.

But the regulations Mr. Pei proposed were indeed not very friendly to clubs, and some clubs would be unhappy.

And the result of unhappiness could only be parting ways, because Mr. Pei was never a person who would compromise.

Zhang Yuan could vaguely guess from Mr. Pei’s attitude that he truly didn’t seem to care about the resources these clubs controlled!

After a moment of silence, Zhang Yuan said, “Mr. Pei, emotionally, I support regulating the league, because without rules, there can be no square circles. When the league is standardized, it can form healthy competition.”

“However, such strict control measures will deter many clubs. Compared to the losses and benefits… is it worth it?”

“What if we deter the clubs and the league’s funding, attention, and exposure are all affected? If more than half of those established clubs leave, what if the losses we bear far outweigh the benefits?”

Pei Qian chuckled: “Of course it’s worth it.”

Zhang Yuan was silent for a moment, then nodded: “Alright.”

Since Mr. Pei was so certain, he must have seen more long-term benefits, so Zhang Yuan didn’t ask further.

“So, Mr. Pei, what will this new regulatory department be called?” Zhang Yuan asked.

Pei Qian thought for a moment: “Let’s call it the E-Sports Division. This is also a good opportunity to get the GOG professional league, GPL, started.”

“The current few clubs can be given priority access, but the premise is that they must accept our conditions and supervision.”

“As for how to arrange the specific schedule, let’s consider that after the new department is established.”

Zhang Yuan nodded: “Understood, Mr. Pei.”

After seeing Mr. Pei off, Zhang Yuan returned to the conference room and read through all the content he had noted down earlier, trying to deduce the deeper meaning behind Mr. Pei’s move.

For Zhang Yuan, his biggest confusion now was Mr. Pei’s statement, “Of course it’s worth it.”

For the current e-sports industry, the priority was definitely to expand the market.

Although the GOG Global Invitational had achieved good attention, people with discerning eyes could see that this competition had much room for improvement.

There was great potential for the future.

Mr. Pei had also said that he wanted to create the GOG professional league, GPL, which was also about expanding the e-sports market.

But the problem was that constraining clubs with such strict regulatory conditions was, to some extent, going against this goal.

How exactly did Mr. Pei make this trade-off?

Zhang Yuan began to seriously analyze each requirement proposed by Mr. Pei.