EWC Champion Craime Has a Surprising Football Past

Did you know that Esports World Cup 2026 winner for Street Fighter 6, Craime, almost went on to become a professional football player? This and many more fun facts were revealed in an interview with Craime’s former team, Black Esports.

Japanese esports caster Frieda was able to score an interview with Black Esports. The Chilean team is well-known for establishing young Chilean talent and pushing them out into the world. They were the team that first nurtured both Blaz and Craime, and recently, they announced another young SF6 player, Christopher “McLovin” Gonzalez, joining their team. McLovin is 13 and is understood to be a Kimberly player who has already started making a name for himself.

In the interview, Frieda set out to understand how Black Esports came about, their structure, and the operations in place to nurture the talent that they have.

The interview is on Frieda’s YouTube channel and is in Japanese, and while there was a lot talked about, there were some interesting pieces of information about some of the best young players on the planet.

For one, the interview revealed that Craime is actually the son of a director of Black Esports and has been using a fight stick since he was 9 years old. It was also disclosed that he played for the youth team of a popular Chilean football team, Colo-Colo, but has decided to focus on fighting games.

When asked how they feel about seeing their players move on to other teams, as is the case right now with Blaz at 2Game Esports and Craime with Team Falcons, Black Esports claimed that it is a thing of pride to see their players flourish and chart a career path for themselves.

Among other things that Black Esports has been able to achieve, they highlighted how their program around fighting games has had an effect in keeping some of the kids from crime and other social vices that they might have been involved in if not for the intervention of the esports organization.

They also highlighted some of the players they think will start to make a name for themselves in the near future, with the most prominent being Cloud, an SF6 and Guilty Gear -STRIVE- player who has successfully crowdfunded his trip to France for Evo France 2026.