Everybody Is a Gamer
Giulia Zecchini reads audiences for a living. A former professional basketball player from Milan, she built a commercial career on data, first at Nielsen Sports, then heading business intelligence at Formula One, before spending four years at ESL FACEIT Group, the world's largest esports company, where she turned gaming data into partnerships for brands like DHL, Intel and Gucci. She joined Arsenal in 2025 to lead partnership development, carrying the same conviction across every move: audiences reward brands that show up authentically and commit for the long term, and punish the ones that do not. Gaming, she argues, is no longer a niche but a culture that touches everyone, from the grandparent on Candy Crush to the teenager on Fortnite.
We are at the intersection of being an entertainment company and a tech company.
Giulia Zecchini is Partnership Development Lead at Arsenal F.C., where she joined in June 2025 after four years as Commercial Strategy Director at ESL FACEIT Group, the world's largest esports company. A former professional basketball player turned data-driven commercial strategist, she has built a career at the intersection of sport, gaming, and brand partnerships, bringing the same analytical rigour she developed at Nielsen Sports and Formula One to the challenge of connecting brands with passionate, digitally native communities.
Born and raised in Milan, Giulia grew up immersed in sport. Her father Massimo played professional basketball and her grandfather was both a professional swimmer and sports journalist. She started playing basketball at twelve after being scouted during a school visit, eventually competing semi-professionally in Italy before moving to the UK at eighteen for university. She holds a BA in Sociology from the University of Warwick and an MSc in Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Management from Imperial College London, and has continued playing in the Women's National Basketball League for the London All-Stars.
Her commercial career began at Nielsen Sports, where she joined the graduate programme working on brands including Mars and Coca-Cola before moving into the football division as an account manager. There she worked with Premier League clubs including Manchester City, Chelsea, and Arsenal on sponsorship evaluations, TV audience analysis, and fan studies. In late 2017, she joined Formula One following Liberty Media's acquisition, heading up commercial business intelligence for the league and pioneering research around fan dwell time at circuits to optimise sponsor activations and event layouts across 24 different race venues.
When the pandemic hit, Giulia made the leap into gaming, joining ESL FACEIT Group in 2021 as Commercial Strategy Lead, later becoming Commercial Strategy Director. At EFG she led a team of analysts supporting the commercial and business development functions, translating audience data into actionable insights and creative partnership frameworks for global brands including DHL, Intel, Monster, and Gucci. The company, formed from the merger of ESL, FACEIT, Dreamhack, and Dreamhack Sports, reaches over 225 million gamers annually through broadcast, digital content, and 26-plus live events across sold-out arenas from Rio de Janeiro to Tokyo.
Outside her day job, Giulia is known across basketball and sneaker culture as Giulia Zed. She co-founded Sneaker Sisterhood in 2019, now one of Europe's largest female communities in the sneaker and streetwear space, collaborating with brands including Converse, Jordan, Nike, and Puma. She is also a presenter and host for FIBA, covering EuroLeague Women, the FIBA Basketball World Cup, and the Eurocup, and was recognised as one of the 30 Under 30 Leaders in Sport. In December 2024, she became an investor in Peak Moods.
I'm always looking for people that get the numbers, but then can storytell with those numbers.
The gaming community is very vocal. If you disrupt their ecosystem too much, they will call you out and they will not enjoy it. It's not like a traditional sports fan that is used to being bombarded with advertising, sponsors on jerseys, LED boards. They will notice everything. So you need to make sure that you are adding value throughout whatever you do.
Gaming audiences, Giulia warns, do not behave like traditional sports fans. A football supporter is used to sponsor logos on shirts and LED boards and barely registers them; a gaming community registers everything, and says so loudly. Try to buy your way in or disrupt the experience and they will call it out in public. The only way through is to add genuine value at every step, so the brand earns its place rather than renting it. Authenticity, in her telling, is not a nice-to-have in gaming; it is the entry fee.
We have people in our arenas that literally chant DHL when they come to Dota 2 events, and I don't think I've ever seen that happen in my career in sports. DHL is one of my favourite partners. They're very good across their sponsorship portfolio and everything that they do, whether it's rugby or football or gaming.
The proof that a partnership has worked, Giulia says, is when the crowd chants the sponsor's name. She has watched fans at Dota 2 events chant DHL, something she never once saw across a career in football and Formula One. That kind of affinity does not come from a logo placement; it comes from a brand that shows up consistently, year after year, and does things the community actually wants. DHL is her favourite example precisely because it treats gaming with the same seriousness as its rugby and football sponsorships. The reward for that commitment is a level of devotion most sponsors never reach.
I would say go in with a long-term plan. I know a lot of people say dip your feet. I disagree. If you dip your feet in gaming, you are bound to fail or just see it as a failure because you can't really compare it to any other entertainment pillar. Go in with a long-term strategy, a long-term investment plan and work with experts.
The most common mistake brands make in gaming, Giulia argues, is treating it as an experiment. The conventional advice is to dip a toe in; she flatly disagrees. Gaming cannot be judged against the yardsticks of other entertainment, so a tentative, short-term outing is almost designed to look like a failure and be abandoned. Her counsel is the opposite: arrive with a long-term plan, a real investment horizon, and expert partners who know the terrain. Brands that commit for the long haul build a rapport with gaming audiences that she has rarely seen anywhere else.
One year we did a reaction test comparing Formula One drivers to PC gamers. And a lot of the pro PC gamers were faster than the Formula One drivers, and Formula One drivers are the elite of the elite in terms of reaction times. So it's very cool to see these comparisons.
Giulia is impatient with the idea that gaming is passive. At one event her team ran a reaction test pitting professional PC gamers against Formula One drivers, who sit among the fastest-reacting athletes on earth. Many of the gamers were quicker. Having watched Counter-Strike players move a mouse and keyboard at close range, she is unsurprised; the speed and coordination are, in her word, mind-blowing. Gaming, she points out, builds teamwork, communication and split-second decision-making, the same soft skills that carry people into careers in engineering and science long after they stop competing.
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