After the recent launch of the official G2 Performance Lab, gameland.gg sat down with the platform’s director, Ismael Pedraza, for a detailed interview discussing the future of esports player performance at G2 and beyond.
The esports scene continues to further develop with each passing year, and many of its modern advances are comparable to those being made in traditional sports. The focus is increasingly on maximizing competitor performance, getting the most out of each player and athlete. G2 has historically been at the forefront of this development, and the organization’s new Performance Lab is just the latest example of this.
G2 Performance Lab director Ismael Pedraza, who is also a performance coach for the organization’s highly competitive League of Legends team, took time to speak with us on the importance of the lab and how esports competitors might be able to prolong their playing careers while becoming the best versions of themselves.
gameland.gg: What even inspired you and G2 Esports to create the new Performance Lab?
Ismael Pedraza: I have had this idea since I started esports many years ago because this is sort of normal in traditional sports. But then, throughout the years, we saw more and more that esports is maturing, and that the marginal gains are deciding a lot of things about performance outcomes and winning titles.
But I can still see that we are lagging on the science element because we are basically translating a lot of things from traditional sports into esports, while esports as a context is a very specific. So with G2, we wanted to basically close that gap and not just import sport science elements directly into what we do.
We want to build this applied research foundation specific to esports while considering our own realities. We want to lead in that area, but we also want to help the industry to grow as a whole.
So you felt that there were gaps in performance specific to esports that needed to be better addressed in the industry?
Yeah, absolutely. There is already a lot of research mentioning what the top priorities are, and what the stressors and demands are [for players]. For example, there’s sleep, mental health, coach development, and how this all influences performance.
I have my performance mindset, but I also have my human part, which is a lot about “I want the players to develop,” and “I want the players to have a life after they perform,” and I think these two things should be hand-in-hand.
Some top esports organizations already have performance departments, or have had them previously. There’s Fnatic with its High-Performance Unit. 100 Thieves regularly works with performance coaches. T1 has a comprehensive support staff. How does G2’s Performance Lab differ from those?
I believe they are different from what we’re doing here mostly because we don’t want to have a one-off sort of approach. We have a so-called holistic ecological approach, which means that we are connecting player performance, which is the end goal, with everything around them.
What they do in a day, how they do it, who is around them, how is their environment set up, what has been going in their background in the past, and how we can basically facilitate everything around them so that we aren’t just aiming to place bandages, but rather looking into embedding the different rosters that we have with formal academic sort of partnerships with, for example, universities.
We want to unify this approach to connect the basic dots that allow [for peak] performance. We see it as a long-term perspective rather than just as a support unit.
Can you walk us through what a typical day would look like in the G2 Performance Lab?
I think what we’re doing at the moment is creating the structure and the foundation, since we want to have a good foundation that we can use for specific projects. We have four pillars: there’s the coach and coach development; training methodologies, which include player development; support systems; and health.
From these pillars, we’re creating specific projects. This year, for example, we have coach learning sessions, observing other teams, and running a mental fatigue type of study where we’re collecting specific data in order to develop interventions that will allow us to mitigate that cognitive fatigue.
We also have nutrition and sleep workshops for the different rosters of [G2] players and a mental health project, where we’re aiming to educate not only G2 players and coaches but also the other employees of our organization.
So this is around what we have established for this year, and as you can see, we’re looking at different areas, and we’re including all the rosters of our organization. At the same time, we’re working on the 2027 set of projects within those pillars as a follow-up to the different projects that we already got started.
So you mentioned that mental heakth is a major factor in all of this. Would you say that social media and how it affects esports athletes will also be considered through the G2 Performance Lab?
Yeah, definitely. I mean, this is one of those elements in terms of the holistic perspective of performance that we will look at from a macro perspective. Those macro elements are, for example, social media, and interaction with fans or even family.
We wouldn’t singularly target this social media element, but it will be more for understanding how we are dealing with or coping with specific stressors and then addressing those specific stressors. So right now, for this first year, it will be a lot about the coach interaction and how the coaches will be dealing with any of those elements that could be influencing performance, [including] social media.
Since I’m the performance coach of the LEC team, there will be more specific interactions with me and the players, and how we’re dealing with all the noise that is happening around the LEC team. There are different factors, but we’re creating structures to have these conversations.
It sounds like a bunch of branches that are part of one larger tree.
Yeah, definitely. And then we’re creating the roots and the foundations strong enough to be able to have some sustainability for the different branches.
It’s only been a month since the performance lab was officially launched, though you’ve been working on it since late 2025. Would you say there’s anything you’ve found that affects player performance that might surprise the average fan? Or maybe something that even surprised you?
Yeah, I’ve been here for 10 years already, so I have a lot [of experience]. Maybe something surprising will be that the lack of hobbies that [some] players have could affect performance, and this means more in the direction of monotony.
A regular day for the players is just the same thing over and over again. We’re working on one of our pillars about training structures and how we are practicing, and this is what we want to modify and [push] in a different direction. But I would say not having hobbies is an important factor that influences mental fatigue. Not having any type of specific habits will influence decision-making and recovery.
Something interesting that has a lot of effect on players is sleep and how they implement recovery systems to feel better and perform better the day after. [But] that’s more interesting than surprising.
Speaking of your findings, G2 is obviously one of the most well-known successful esports organizations in the world today. How do you balance competitive secrecy with your goal of advancing the wider esports industry?
Yeah, trade secrets and all that, right? I will say that what’s important is how you do things rather than what [you do].
I think in this era of AI and [shared] knowledge, you can know a lot just by typing the right questions into any of those systems. So I think for me it’s a lot about the data that we have or the projects that we’re creating. When we’re sharing things while anonymizing who we are talking about if there is something very specific or a private conversation, rather than just cutting part of the information just because we want to protect a finding.
Because I come from a scientific background, I make sure that this lab will function with rigor and transparency. We have to protect our participants, and there will be specific systems that we might be discovering that we need to be careful around how we share them.
But with all the projects that we’re having, we’re just talking about human interaction. We’re creating some systems to mitigate or to reduce mental fatigue, but then these things need to be put out there to test so we can continue improving the practices.
Esports players were once thought to be at their peak while very young, before quickly deteriorating as they aged. But that idea has changed in recent years, and it’s now more commonly believed that burnout is a primary issue for many players rather than just getting older. How can the G2 Performance Lab improve players’ career longevity by combating this tendency?
I think this is one of the [reasons] why the lab exists and is about to modify the structure and the system of how we develop performance. There are these ideas that an old player’s mechanics just get worse, or that they get burned out because of the intensity of practice. In this case, this is trainable, right? So it’s just about understanding, and that’s what we’re doing with the lab. We’re understanding how we’re training, understanding what the stressors are, including burnout and aging.
Even before I started the lab, my perspective was a lot about how we are living our daily [life], how we’re making sure that we’re supporting the players correctly, how we are reinforcing the right behaviors and the right attitudes and feelings between each other when we have these very close teams that interact with each other all the time. So for me it’s a lot about training those recovery strategies, understanding what creates the stressors, and how to integrate and educate our players’ mental health support with smarter training designs.
For example, in games like League of Legends, we just continue having this idea of a grinding mindset, which works because it’s repetition and if you repeat something over and over; you’ll get better. But the cost is higher than just having more deliberate structures around it, and all these things will be related to burnout, monotony, and aging.
If we are able to reframe the understanding of the need to invest in the long-term [benefit] of our players and coaches, we will be able to turn this around. This is how the lab is operating. Discovering, creating awareness, then creating interventions, protocols, and programs to be able to support those discoveries.
I think this also touches on the hobby interest point that you brought up. When a pro League of Legends competitor is competing on the big stage, he’s playing League of Legends. When he has free time, he may be streaming League of Legends. And when he’s training, he’s playing League of Legends.
Exactly. I have a nice story with one player that I had at [esports organization] Rogue a few years ago. I think I can mention who he is: Odoamne.
When he came into the team, he had to adjust, and at some point we had some rough paths. We were struggling as every team does [at some point] every year. And we discussed this hobby idea and finding something that he’s able to focus on, something different than the struggles and the challenges of the day-to-day with the team. How to get better, how to improve, and how to perform.
He found playing the violin to be a very nice hobby to have. So he had to take the step to buy a violin, take an instrument that he had never touched in his life, and then just start training or practicing and learning the basics on a YouTube video to the point that he was practicing almost every night after scrims, and it was a nice reset sort of strategy, and then he kept up with that. That was really cool.
In G2 as well, we have BrokenBlade who likes the piano. Every time we’re at international events, and there are some pianos in the lobby, he will be playing that, or he will bring his own piano, just a foldable type of keyboard to play. So we have different examples like that, and we’re pushing even more for that.
Having something that can act as a mental reset seems very important, especially with the grinding culture of esports.
Yeah, definitely. The monotony is something that isn’t discussed that much because monotony can have different terms and different elements. But breaking the monotony of those teams that basically practice at the same place, like all the League of Legends tournaments and Valorant as well. Maybe Counter-Strike is a little bit different because they’re traveling all the time, but they have different challenges.
Finding ways to break that monotony is important, and they also want to learn. They want to develop skills and see that they are improving in life as well, even though they focus so much on the game.
The G2 Performance Lab is purely dedicated to esports performance, but you mentioned that it actually borrows ideas from traditional sports. Do you think the opposite could someday be true? Maybe traditional sports could borrow something from G2 Performance Lab’s findings?
Absolutely. This is the idea of my work as well. For example, with my PhD I focus on decision-making and developing talent in high-performance environments. We see esports as a very strong bet, specifically for cognition, psychophysiology, and decision-making. It’s really a cognitive test in itself, which many academics are already looking into. They use this context of esports to understand other domains like affective emotions and hardware variability.
These types of tools are very accessible and ecologically valid to implement in esports because players are seated in front of the screen. There are so many different tools that will help us to understand decision-making under pressure, or any other cognitive ability.
So for sure there will be things [taken primarily from esports], but we’re at the beginning of that. We can test theories from sport science in an esports context, and then we can reformulate some of those theories for the esports context.
Looking ahead, what’s the one thing you hope the G2 Performance Lab is remembered for five years from now?
I would say that a lot of things happen in just one year in esports. So five years is a decade in esports. I think we definitely want to continue building a body of work at the academic level, and hope that the academic field gets to see esports as a place where they can learn from, and then just to legitimize esports as a very strong field that will serve for performance development.
We also want to adapt to the new era we live in, the globalized era in terms of video games, because I think video games and gaming in general are still not very highly rewarded in some sectors. So we hope that we are able to add not just in performance but also to general society. Here we’re talking about, for example, mental health in esports, [and we want] to do more of that.
And then to have a physical lab where we can invite different teams from different [areas] to be able to do some work together, to create workshops and more structured grassroots events. Something very well established in that manner, so that they see G2 Performance Lab as the landmark of performance in esports and sports.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
