France's esports player contract: one to five years, pay in writing

A player who joins a French team as an employee signs an employment contract written for esports alone. It sets how long the player is tied to the team, what the pay sheet must show and what happens when an employer cuts corners. For a player weighing an offer, a team building a roster or a sponsor looking at how a club is run, it is the frame that decides whether a salary is a real wage with real protections or a promise on a page.

France built that frame by law in 2016 and completed it with decrees the following year. The French Ministry of the Economy, through its Directorate General for Enterprises, known by its French initials DGE, describes the whole system on a page titled "statut des joueurs professionnels salariés de jeux vidéo", the status of salaried professional video game players, published on November 15, 2024. The ministry presents the page as information: the binding rules are the texts it cites.

This guide follows that page step by step. It covers where the status comes from, who may use the contract and how a team gets approved, how long the contract lasts and the two cases where it may be shorter, how the game seasons are defined, what the written contract must contain, what the employer owes the players, the penalties, the special case of players aged 16, and the list of approved teams as the ministry publishes it. It describes the general rule; how it applies to one player or one club depends on the case.

French Ministry of the Economy, Directorate General for Enterprises, page on the status of salaried professional video game players, published November 15, 2024.

Where the status comes from

The status rests on the law for a Digital Republic, law number 2016-1321 of October 7, 2016. Two of its articles, 101 and 102, deal with esports players. According to the ministry, the law created a new status for salaried professional video game players and set the conditions under which minors aged 16 who are still subject to compulsory schooling may be employed by professional esports teams.

The law was followed by two decrees, both dated May 9, 2017. Decree number 2017-872 concerns the status of salaried professional players of competitive video games. Decree number 2017-871 concerns the organization of video game competitions, the other half of the same reform. A ministerial order of April 17, 2018 then fixed the list of start and end dates of competition seasons, a detail that matters for the length of contracts, as a later section shows.

The ministry's list of reference texts adds two codes. Articles L. 321-8 to L. 321-11 of the Code of Internal Security are cited alongside the competition decree. Articles L. 7124-1 to L. 7124-35 of the Labour Code, which the ministry cites for the employment of minors, apply to the youngest players.

The ministry's general page on esports, published on November 14, 2024, places the status in a wider policy. Since the 2016 law, it says, the state has been involved in the sector, overseeing both competitions and players, and an interministerial strategy for 2020 to 2025 set the goal of making France the European leader in esports by 2025. The same page cites a 2024 report of the national economic observatory of esports, which estimated the French sector's revenue at €141 million for 2023 and its jobs at about 1,000 full-time equivalents.

Who can offer the contract

The player contract is not open to any company that hires a gamer. It belongs to structures that hold an approval, called an agrément in French, granted by the minister in charge of digital affairs. The ministry's page is explicit on the other side of the rule as well: an approved structure that employs professional video game players must use this contract.

The approval is valid for three years and can be renewed. A team that wants to keep it must file its renewal request at least three months before the approval expires. Requests go to the Directorate General for Enterprises, by email or by post to its offices in Paris, with a signed application form.

The process, as the ministry lays it out, runs in a fixed order, from the application to the renewal.

The documents differ with the legal form of the applicant. An association, the French non-profit legal form, sends its current statutes, the minutes of the last three meetings of its deliberating body and its annual accounts for the last three financial years, or since its creation if it is younger than three years. A company sends its current statutes with its unique identification number, and its balance sheets and operating accounts for the last three financial years, or since its creation. Both add any document that shows the quality of the follow-up given to the players.

What the ministry checks

The approval criteria, as listed by the ministry, are four. The structure's corporate purpose must include taking part in video game competitions. It must have sufficient human, material and financial means. It must give its players appropriate supervision and follow-up, which the page describes as physical, psychological and professional. And its managers must have no criminal conviction, and no civil, commercial or administrative sanction, that bars them from running a legal entity or carrying on a commercial activity.

The approval is not permanent once granted. The ministry lists five grounds on which it can be withdrawn:

1. employing, under the player contract, people who do not meet the legal definition of a salaried professional player;
2. failing to respect the rules on the work of minors set by article 101 of the law;
3. no longer meeting one of the approval criteria;
4. failing to respect the rules on health and safety at work;
5. carrying on activities other than the ones declared.

Read together, the criteria and the grounds for withdrawal describe what the state expects of a team that employs players: a real esports purpose, the means to pay and support a roster, managers with a clean record, and employment used only for the people it was designed for.

One to five years

The contract itself is a fixed-term contract, in French a contrat à durée déterminée or CDD, the opposite of the open-ended contract, the contrat à durée indéterminée or CDI. The ministry gives its length plainly: at least one year and at most five years.

The contract can be renewed indefinitely, and the ministry adds that renewal comes without any waiting period between two contracts. According to the same page, the contract does not need a precise end date and can be concluded for a minimum duration. The ministry also states that the contract carries no mandatory precarity indemnity, the end-of-contract payment known in French as the indemnité de précarité.

For a player, the floor of one year is the core protection. A team cannot, as a rule, sign a player for a few weeks of a tournament and let the contract lapse. For a team, the ceiling of five years is the limit of how long it can secure a player under this status, and renewal without a waiting period lets it extend a player it wants to keep.

In France, a salaried player's contract is built around the season, and a team that wants a player for less than a year has to say why.

The two exceptions to the one-year minimum

The ministry's page allows a contract shorter than one year in two cases only.

The first is replacement. A team may hire a player for less than a year to replace a player who is absent or suspended. The contract then covers the gap left by the missing player.

The second is the season. A contract may run for less than a year when it lasts at least until the end of the season. The ministry notes that this second exception can be used to create a team, to enter a new game or to open new player positions, which covers a roster assembled partway through a competitive year.

Neither exception removes the other rules of the contract. A short contract signed under them is still a fixed-term player contract, written down and with every mandatory mention described below.

How a season is defined

Because the second exception refers to the end of the season, the law needed a precise definition of what a season is. It is fixed by ministerial order, the order of April 17, 2018, which sets start and end dates according to the games and their competitive circuits.

The ministry's page sets out the calendars as follows. Riot Games, the publisher of League of Legends and Valorant, has two circuits with their own season. Other publishers and independent developers share four circuits, each starting on the first day of a quarter.

In practice, the calendar tells a team how far a short contract must run. On the first Riot Games circuit, for example, a season ends on April 29, so a contract signed during that season and shorter than a year must run at least until that date to use the season exception.

What the written contract must say

The ministry's page is detailed on form. The contract must be in writing, drawn up in at least three copies, and it must set out the rights and obligations provided for by article 102 of the law for a Digital Republic. It must be handed to the player no later than two working days after hiring.

It must also contain a set of mandatory mentions. According to the ministry, these are:

• the identity and address of the parties;
• the hiring date and the length of the contract;
• the job held and the activities carried out;
• the amount of the pay and its components, including bonuses and salary extras where there are any;
• the names and addresses of the supplementary pension fund, the provident fund and the complementary health insurance body;
• the title of the collective agreements that apply.

The pay mention is the heart of the contract for a salaried player. The status, as the ministry describes it, does not fix a salary level: it fixes how the salary is written. Every element of what the player is paid, including bonuses, has to appear in the contract. A player can therefore read in one document what the team owes, and a dispute over pay starts from a written figure rather than a verbal promise.

The mentions of pension, provident and health bodies matter for the same reason. They place the player inside the ordinary French system of salaried employment, with the funds that go with it, rather than outside it as a contractor.

What the employer owes the players

Two obligations go beyond the paperwork. The first concerns how a contract can end. The ministry states that the contract cannot contain a clause of pure and simple unilateral termination, meaning a clause that would let one party end the contract at will without any other condition.

The second concerns daily work. The employer must guarantee equal treatment in preparation and training to all of its salaried players. A team cannot, under this rule, give one part of its salaried roster the coaching and practice time and leave the other part without it.

Those two rules complete the protection of the fixed term. The length of the contract tells the player how long the job lasts, the ban on pure and simple unilateral termination keeps that length from being undone by a clause, and equal treatment in training keeps a player under contract from being sidelined in practice.

Penalties for a non-compliant contract

The status has sanctions of two kinds. The first is civil: when the rules on substance or on form are not respected, the contract is requalified as an open-ended contract. The fixed term the team chose disappears, and the player is treated as employed for an indefinite period.

The second is criminal. The employer faces a fine of €3,750. In case of a repeat offence, the penalty rises to six months' imprisonment and a fine of €7,500.

For a team, requalification turns a contract designed to end on a known date into an employment relationship with no end date at all, which is the reverse of what the fixed term was meant to give it.

Players aged 16

The law also opened professional esports to minors aged 16 who are still subject to compulsory schooling. An approved structure may employ them, but only after an authorization of the Commission des enfants du spectacle, the commission in charge of children working in entertainment, and that authorization is given for each minor individually.

The rules of the Labour Code on children in entertainment, articles L. 7124-1 to L. 7124-35, then apply. The ministry's page names the main areas they cover: limits on the length and the hours of work, the hardship of the work, and the placing of part of the pay in escrow until the player comes of age.

That escrow is held at the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, the public institution the ministry's page names for it. The commission sets the share of the pay that is placed there, and the rest is left to the minor's legal representatives. The page gives no share or hour limit in figures: the commission sets the share when it reviews each application.

For a team, a 16-year-old player is therefore three steps away from the first match: an approved structure, the commission's individual authorization, and a contract that respects both the player status and the rules on child labor. Breaking the rules on the work of minors is also one of the grounds on which the team's approval can be withdrawn.

The approved teams on the ministry's list

The ministry publishes the list of approved structures with the date each approval was granted. The page of November 15, 2024 shows five names.

The list is the ministry's own, as it stands on that page; it gives the date each approval was first granted, not its renewals. Since an approval lasts three years, a structure on the list keeps the right to use the player contract only as long as it renews on time and continues to meet the criteria.

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