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CITY SC Also Boasts One of the Best ‘Virtual Soccer’ Players in the World | St. Louis Metro News | St. Louis

Published

2 years ago

February 15, 2023

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click to enlarge Courtesy of St. Louis CITY SC Niklas Raseck kisses a trophy after winning the FUT Champions Cup in 2019.

In June 2022, the brass for CITY SC held an intervention. Something wasn’t working.

The problem, though, had nothing to do with the field. It had to do with eMLS, the American virtual soccer league. CITY SC had an eMLS player since 2020, but it wasn’t winning. And the front office needed to know why.

“What [does] eMLS mean to the club moving forward? And how are we going to approach it and get into a winning position?” Peter Wood, vice president of creative and content for CITY SC, remembers people asking.

Wood didn’t just want to host an eMLS team for fun. He wanted to win. Although teams don’t need an eMLS player, nearly every team has one. Some have two. LA United even has three.

During the meetings, Wood explained the virtues: Signing an eMLS player elevates the entire program. Esports as an industry is on pace to break $1 billion in revenue, according to Insider Intelligence, and FIFA is only gaining steam. In its first seven days of availability, FIFA23 surpassed 10 million players. There are virtual leagues tied to professional leagues across the world in Europe, in Africa, in Australia. Major League Soccer in America started its league in 2018. Millions of people watch these games. Take last week’s Twitch stream of the eMLS League Series 2 tournament, which drew nearly 500,000 viewers. The 2022 eChampions League final received nearly 5 million views on Youtube.

Wood knew that a good eMLS player wouldn’t only be fun — they could bring more eyes, money and energy to the entire organization.

“When you have a winning player on your team, it lifts the whole club,” Wood says. “Everybody gets excited about it. The players get behind it. It brings a lot of pride to the city.”

The brass listened. They gave Wood the go-ahead. Get who you want, they said. So Wood started doing research, Twitter DMing different players, studying records, scouring past games and scheduling multiple interviews.

That’s when he found Niklas Raseck, a 24-year-old esports FIFA player who had never visited St. Louis, who resided in Germany, who had won multiple international tournaments, qualified for the FIFA World Cup three times and earned over $215,000 in prize winnings during his career.

In short, CITY SC signed one of the best virtual soccer players on the planet.

Wood was drawn by Raseck’s success on a global scale, in big games, in front of live crowds. (“Somebody that’s got that winning mentality ingrained in them. Niklas isn’t here to participate. He wants to win competitions for St. Louis.”) Wood was drawn to his playing style. (“Nicholas’s style was very similar to [CITY SC]. He’s a real brute when he gets behind the controller. He wants to attack attack attack.”)

But Wood interviewed plenty of players who had skills. What stood out was how little Raseck talked about his skills.

“He’s a very humble guy,” Wood says.

Raseck, who goes by NRaseck7 and NR7, spoke to the RFT via phone from New York City in late January, just hours from his first tournament with CITY SC. The stakes are high. Raseck, the first European to play in eMLS, is tasked with reviving the team’s eMLS program.

But this didn’t seem to phase Raseck. He was calm over the phone, soft-spoken and quiet, as if he had answered questions and prepared for tournaments many times.

“I didn’t really plan to get into it. It just, like … ” he says, pausing, “happened to be my job at some point.”

Raseck grew up in Recklinghausen, a German city with more than 114,000 people. He was a solid goalie — until he broke his arm at 13 and found himself playing video games more frequently.

“I realized that I was getting better at the game,” he says.

Getting better is an understatement. At 14, he signed up for a FIFA tournament: the national German championship.

Raseck, somehow, someway, reached the semi-finals.

“That’s how it all started for me,” he says.

Still, he didn’t plan to become a professional FIFA player. He wanted to attend college. But he kept winning. Two years later, Raseck captured the 2016 German FIFA championship. That same year, he signed his first professional contract and flew to New York City. A year after graduating from high school, in 2019, he won the FIFA Ultimate Team 20 Champions Cup. In 2021, he was a finalist for Globe Soccer Awards esports player of the year.

As he kept winning, it was time for a change.

Another day, another signing 🎮⚽️Welcome, @NRaseck7 – our 2023 @eMLS FIFA player and the newest member of the club. Let’s goooo, Niklas!— St Louis CITY SC (@stlCITYsc) November 10, 2022

In October, after two months of vetting, CITY SC officially announced that it had signed Niklas Raseck as its eMLS player for the 2022 season. The year started in January with League Series 1 and League Series 2 in February. The two tournaments lead up to the championship, the eMLS Cup, from March 11 to 12, where Raseck will enter as the four seed out of 26 players.

“This year my plan is obviously to bring a trophy home to St. Louis,” he says.

But he also has a larger goal in sight, the grand prize of them all.

“The big goal from everyone,” he says, “is to win a [FIFAe] World Cup.”

Raseck still lives in Germany with his parents, and he commutes to America for tournaments. But Raseck doesn’t fly across the world, click some buttons and magically finish in first place. Video games are his full-time job.

Raseck spends at least five hours every day playing FIFA in his work office, which features a PC, PS5 and three monitors. When he’s done, he rewatches the games, analyzes them and looks for errors. He tries not to practice more because it could hurt his performance.

“I’m really careful with it because at some point if you play too much, you [overplay], and that can be really bad for creativity in the attack,” he says.

When Wood first started working with professional video gamers, he was floored by the amount of preparation necessary.

“I didn’t really understand the dedication that goes into being a top-level gamer,” Wood says.

In late January, Wood flew out to New York to meet Raseck and watch him compete. He watched the players smash away at their controllers, just inches away from their computer screens — until, bam, in a matter of milliseconds, a defensive player slid just a step late and the ball dropped in the goal, and one player screamed while the other player dropped their head in disappointment.

“It almost gave me a heart attack,” he says.

Watching these games, Wood felt the weight of the sport. This isn’t just a video game. These are athletes, just like the rest of CITY SC.

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Fenton Man Charged in Sword Attack on Roommate

Published

8 months ago

May 22, 2024

Natural Bridge

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A warrant is out for a Fenton man’s arrest after he allegedly attacked his roommate with a sword.

Police say that on Sunday, Angelus Scott spoke openly about “slicing his roommate’s head” before he grabbed a sword, raised it up and then swung it down at the roommate.

The roommate grabbed Scott’s hand in time to prevent injury. When police arrived at the scene, they found the weapon used in the assault.

The sword in question was a katana, which is a Japanese sword recognizable for its curved blade.

This isn’t the first time a samurai-style sword has been used to violent effect in St. Louis. In 2018, a man hearing voices slaughtered his ex-boyfriend with a samurai sword. His mother said he suffered from schizoaffective disorder.

As for Scott, 35, the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office was charged yesterday with two felonies, assault first degree and armed criminal action. The warrant for his arrest says he is to be held on $200,000 bond.

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Caught on Video, Sheriff Says He’s Ready to ‘Turn It All Over’ to Deputy

Published

8 months ago

May 22, 2024

Natural Bridge

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Video of St. Louis Sheriff Vernon Betts taken by a former deputy suggests that the sheriff has a successor in mind to hand the reins of the department over to, even as Betts is in an increasingly heated campaign for reelection.

“I ain’t here for all this rigmarole,” Betts says in the video while seated behind his desk at the Carnahan Courthouse. “The Lord sent me here to turn this department around and I’m doing the best I can and I think I’ve done a good job. I’ve got about eight months and I’m going to qualify for my fourth pension.”

He goes on, “Right now I can walk up out of here and live happily ever after and forget about all this…and live like a king.”

The sheriff then says his wife has been in Atlanta looking at houses and that the other deputy in the room, Donald Hawkins, is someone Betts has been training “to turn it all over to him.”

Asked about the video, Betts tells the RFT, “My future plans are to win reelection on August 6th by a wide margin and to continue my mission as the top elected law enforcement official to make St. Louis safer and stronger. Serving the people of St. Louis with integrity, honor and professional law enforcement qualifications is a sacred responsibility, and I intend to complete that mission.”

The video of Betts was taken by Barbara Chavers, who retired from the sheriff’s office in 2016 after 24 years of service. Chavers now works security at Schnucks at Grand and Gravois. Betts’ brother Howard works security there, too.

Chavers tells the RFT that she was summoned to Betts’ office last week after Betts’ brother made the sheriff aware that she was supporting Montgomery. It was no secret: Chavers had filmed a Facebook live video in which she said she was supporting Betts’ opponent Alfred Montgomery in the election this fall. “Make the judges safe,” she says in the video, standing in front of a large Montgomery sign on Gravois Avenue. “They need a sheriff who is going to make their courtrooms safe.”

In his office, even as Chavers made clear she was filming him, Betts told Chavers he was “flabbergasted” and “stunned” she was supporting Montgomery.

“I don’t know what I did that would make you go against the preacher man,” he says, referring to himself. He then refers to Montgomery as “ungodly.”

Betts goes on to say that not long ago, he was walking in his neighborhood on St. Louis Avenue near 20th Street when suddenly Montgomery pulled up in his car and, according to Betts, shouted, “You motherfucker, you this, you that. You’re taking my signs down.”

Montgomery tells the RFT that he’s never interacted with Betts outside of candidate forums and neighborhood meetings.

“I don’t think anyone with good sense would do something like that to a sitting sheriff,” Montgomery says.

Montgomery has had campaign signs missing and on at least two occasions has obtained video of people tearing them down. (Chavers notes that the sign that she filmed her original Facebook video in front of is itself now missing.)

One man who lives near Columbus Square says that he recently put out two Montgomery signs, which later went missing. “If they keep taking them, I’ll keep putting them up,” he said.

Betts says he has nothing to do with the missing signs. In the video Chavers filmed in Betts’ office, Betts says that his campaign isn’t in a spot where it needs to resort to tearing down opponents’ signs.

“If you sit here long enough, a man is getting ready to come across the street from City Hall bringing me $500, today,” Betts says. “I’m getting that kind of support. I don’t need to tear down signs.”

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St. Louis to Develop First Citywide Transportation Plan in Decades

Published

8 months ago

May 21, 2024

Natural Bridge

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The City of St. Louis is working to develop its first citywide mobility plan in decades, Mayor Tishaura Jones’ office announced Tuesday. This plan seeks to make it easier for everyone — drivers, pedestrians, bikers and public transit users — to safely commute within the city.

The plan will bring together other city projects like the Brickline Greenway, Future64, the MetroLink Green Line, and more, “while establishing new priorities for a safer, more efficient and better-maintained transportation network across the City,” according to the release.

The key elements in the plan will be public engagement, the development of a safety action plan, future infrastructure priorities and transportation network mapping, according to Jones’ office.

The overarching goals are to create a vision for citywide mobility, plan a mixture of short and long-term mobility projects and to develop improved communication tools with the public to receive transportation updates. In recent years, both people who use public transit and cyclists have been outspoken about the difficulties — and dangers — of navigating St. Louis streets, citing both cuts to public transit and traffic violence.

To garner public input and participation for the plan, Jones’ office said there will be community meetings, focus groups and a survey for residents to share their concerns. The city will also be establishing a Community Advisory Committee. Those interested in learning more should check out at tmp-stl.com/

“Everyone deserves to feel safe when getting around St. Louis, whether they’re driving, biking, walking or taking public transit,” Jones said in a news release. “Creating a comprehensive transportation and mobility plan allows us to make intentional and strategic investments so that moving around St. Louis for jobs, education, and entertainment becomes easier, safer and more enjoyable.”

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