How the Pittsburgh Knights went from a dream to hosting some of the biggest Valorant competitions in North America.

The city of Pittsburgh is known for its sports. The Pittsburgh Steelers built themselves into a football powerhouse with six Super Bowl titles. The Pittsburgh Penguins have the two-headed monster in Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, along with five Stanley Cups, and Roberto Clemente cemented himself as a true hero amongst baseball stars when he played for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

But there’s another team in town that a lot of people don’t know about: the Pittsburgh Knights.

The Pittsburgh Knights are the city’s esports organization, founded by industry veteran James O’Connor. O’Connor has played for esports teams in the past, as well as helped coach Team Liquid to some of their major wins through the years in Counter-Strike. “I’m one of the older team owners/players in the space, and we always played Counter-Strike. I moved back to Pittsburgh, got married in Pittsburgh, and just thought let me just build something for the city.”

He says that the team started with a Twitter account and a dream, but that dream led him to partnering with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Their website states that they’re also partnered with rapper Wiz Kalifa and Pittsburgh Penguins star Evgeni Malkin.

O’Connor says that working with the Steelers really helped shape their business model, but that’s when they realized that trying to prove that esports could be a sustainable business was going to have its challenges. “We realized that there was no real way to run events. So, we would send our players to other people’s events, but there’s no way to monetize that, except for jersey sponsors. And when COVID hit, that really put it through a loop, because there’s no live events with jersey visibility.”

Because COVID was keeping them from continuing to hold their LAN events, that’s when they decided to hold online events. O’Connor says that they wanted the chance to bring people together to celebrate sportsmanship and esports.

It was his love for Counter-Strike and the similarities between that and Valorant that made O’Connor want to start running events for Valorant. “We wanted to be a part of the community, we wanted to drive the community, contribute, and we’ve done that ever since. It culminated to a lot of online events.”

After successfully hosting multiple years’ worth of events for Riot, the publisher of Valorant, O’Connor says that they approached Riot for the opportunity to host an offline event. The Knights have been running the Challengers League, as well as the Sakura Cup, which is an all-female tournament, so it was only natural for Riot to allow the Knights their shot at holding an off-season event.

This is what led to The Knight’s Forge, a four-day LAN event, which saw 32 of the top North America teams competing for a $15,000 prize pool. This is the first time the city of Pittsburgh will be holding an esports tournament of this level, according to an interview that Angelica Sirabella, the Knights director of marketing, gave to KDKA news in Pittsburgh.

O’Connor says that this is just the beginning for the Knights. He plans to host other events, and eventually a regional event for Valorant, in hopes to build a successful event company that will be driven not only by himself, but by the teams. “Event companies for a long time essentially ignore teams and don’t partner with teams in a meaningful way. So, my goal, my whole goal, is to build the NFL of gaming.”

The Knights can be found at knights.gg.