Alex Francois Leaves Riot Games to Rejoin the NFL
The man that helped shape what Valorant esports looks like today goes home.
After more than two-and-a-half years at Riot Games in multiple roles, Alex Francois has left the company to return to the National Football League (NFL) as director of football business strategy.Â
Francois joined Riot in early 2020 as global head of competitive operations for Valorant esports, spearheading the development and deployment of just about every aspect of the game’s global competitive ecosystem—a challenging task at the time due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In January of this year, Francois took a more prominent role with the company as its global head of competitive operations, doing similar heavy lifting across all of Riot’s competitive ecosystems to implement new rules, structures, and best practices.
The move back to the NFL makes sense given that Francois spent more than six years there in various roles–with his post before leaving in 2020 being football operations and administration.Â
Francois also founded a Los Angeles-based business consulting and services company called Avium Oculus Consulting in June—details on this new business are pretty thin as of the time of writing.
Having spent the last two-and-a-half years at Riot refining and improving its top esports, it will be interesting to see if NFL management will be wise enough to leverage his expertise to improve on its joint efforts with EA and competitive Madden NFL.Â
It's interesting to think about esports companies hiring non-endemic staff, because you kind of have to worry about them "leap frogging" back to non-endemic positions. Not saying that's what happened here, but I think the "advantage" to hiring endemic talent is that they want to stay within the industry and are probably likely to stay in higher positions like this for longer.
>"it will be interesting to see if NFL management will be wise enough to leverage his expertise to improve on its joint efforts with EA and competitive Madden NFL. "
Fat chance.