Team Vitality sign French retailer Leclerc as main partner

The center of a Team Vitality jersey has a new name on it. The French esports club announced on Tuesday, February 17, 2026, that Leclerc, one of the largest retailers in France, becomes its main partner. The club published the news in a press release on its own site, and The Esports Advocate and Esports Insider both reported it the same day.

A main partner is the sponsor a club puts first. Its logo takes the most visible place on the shirt the players wear on stage and on camera, and its name leads the list of companies that back the club. Neither side said what Leclerc pays for that place or how long the agreement runs: The Esports Advocate wrote that the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Figures given by Esports Insider in its report of February 17, 2026.

What the two companies announced

Team Vitality's release presents the agreement as a strategic partnership of a kind the club has not signed before. It describes Leclerc as the largest player in French retail and as the store brand the French public likes best, which are the club's own words about its new partner, and it calls the two companies two French leaders in their fields. It ties them together through one idea, a shared commitment to making culture accessible to everyone.

The announcement has three parts. The first is visibility: the Leclerc logo on the jerseys of several Team Vitality teams. The second happens in the shops. Leclerc plans to bring esports into its stores through tournaments, activities and what the release calls immersive experiences. The Esports Advocate summed up the aim as connecting communities across France to competitive gaming. The third part is a set of shared programs on health, on inclusion and on the way the two partners speak about their work.

The release gives no calendar for the store events. It does not say how many stores will take part, which games will be played there or when the first tournament will be held.

Six jerseys, and the teams left off the list

The release says the logo is displayed in the center of the jersey, and it names the teams concerned. Esports Insider adds that these are the jerseys players wear at international competitions, and The Esports Advocate uses the same term, international jerseys.

That makes six jerseys across four games. Three of the six belong to League of Legends alone, where the release names three teams: the LEC team, the LFL team and the Rising Bees.

The list does not name the club's Counter-Strike 2 team. Neither the release nor the two press reports mention Counter-Strike in connection with the deal, and none of them gives a reason. The list also leaves out the rosters Team Vitality presented in the week before the announcement, in Call of Duty: Warzone, PUBG and CrossFire, and its return to Fortnite.

Why a supermarket chain is coming to esports

The release states Leclerc's goal plainly: to reach younger audiences, and in particular people aged 18 to 35. It supports that goal with three figures, none of which it attributes to a named study.

The first is the size of the audience. The release calls video games the world's leading cultural industry, with more than 3 billion players. The second is French: more than 23 per cent of French internet users were interested in esports or played it in 2023, the release says. The third is the club's own reach, which Team Vitality puts at about 10 million followers worldwide.

For Leclerc this is new ground. Esports Insider describes the deal as the retailer's first foray into esports, and the club's release calls it a first large-scale move into gaming and esports. The retailer is not a stranger to the products, though. Esports Insider notes that its stores sell gaming peripherals from brands that include Logitech G and Razer. The same report gives the company's scale: founded in 1948, with stores in more than 750 locations across France.

Health, inclusion and the Rising Bees

The shared programs are grouped under three headings.

The first is well-being. The partnership builds on KARE, the program Team Vitality runs on the mental and physical health of its players, which the release says combines performance, nutrition and psychological support. The Esports Advocate lists the joint initiatives as accessibility, wellness and nutrition.

The second is accessibility and inclusion. The Rising Bees, the club's women's League of Legends team, are given a central place in the partnership, and the release promises initiatives dedicated to them. It does not say what those initiatives are.

The third is transparency. The two partners say they will share successes and difficulties openly.

Only one person speaks in the announcement: Nicolas Maurer, the chief executive and co-founder of Team Vitality. He said that when the club was founded in 2013 the dream was to show that esports could become part of everyday life, and he called the agreement a historic moment for the club and for esports in general. He also described it as a way to make esports accessible to everyone and not only to its most passionate fans. No representative of Leclerc is quoted in the release or in the two reports.

Where Leclerc sits among the club's partners

Leclerc arrives on a list that was already long. Esports Insider counts it as Team Vitality's 10th partner. The Esports Advocate names several of the companies it joins, among them Crédit Agricole, Hummel, ASUS ROG, Evnia, Magnum and Secretlab, which Esports Insider describes as a maker of gaming furniture.

The title of main partner sets Leclerc apart from that group. None of the other companies is described that way in the reports: the main partner is the one that holds the middle of the shirt on the six jerseys listed above.

The shirt itself is recent. Esports Insider recalls that Team Vitality unveiled a newly designed jersey in January 2026, made with the French streetwear brand Fulllife. The retailer's logo therefore joins a jersey that was presented only weeks earlier.

A club that has been adding teams

The announcement closes a busy stretch for the organization. Esports Insider speaks of continued expansion in the first two months of 2026, and the club's own press releases show why.

On February 8, Team Vitality reported that its Counter-Strike 2 team had won the first edition of Intel Extreme Masters Kraków, at the Tauron Arena in Poland, beating FURIA 3-1 in the grand final. The club named ZywOo the most valuable player of the event and noted that its five, apEX, ZywOo, ropz, mezii and flameZ, had not changed in a year. The same release looked back on 2025: an ESL Grand Slam, a series of 30 consecutive victories that the club calls a record, two Major titles in a row and the award for team of the year at the HLTV Awards.

On February 11, the club announced three new rosters in shooting games ahead of the Esports World Cup, the multi-game summer event that keeps an overall ranking of clubs. It returned to Call of Duty: Warzone and to PUBG on PC, a game it had last played from 2018 to 2019, and it entered CrossFire for the first time by taking over a roster based in Egypt. The release introduced the Warzone trio as veterans who had already proven themselves at the Esports World Cup, one of them third at the previous Esports World Cup, and said the core of the PUBG squad had placed sixth at the PUBG Global Championship while playing for Nemiga. That release said Team Vitality finished in the top three of the club ranking at the 2025 Esports World Cup. Two days later, on February 13, the club announced its return to Fortnite.

So the deal was signed by a club with a Counter-Strike team that had just won its first trophy of the year and a list of games that grew by four in one week.

What comes next

The sources announce few dates for the partnership itself. The store tournaments and the Rising Bees initiatives are promised without a calendar.

The club's sporting calendar is clearer, at least for the teams that have published one. The Counter-Strike 2 team's next tournament named in the February 8 release is the finals of ESL Pro League Season 23, in Sweden, on March 13. The new Warzone roster is aiming at the Esports World Cup through the Warzone Resurgence Series, whose two in-person finals are held at DreamHack Birmingham and DreamHack Atlanta, with places at the summer event for the best teams. The CrossFire roster plays the CrossFire West League, split into two segments in March and April and in June and July, followed by regional finals.

Those three teams are not among the six that carry the retailer's logo. For the teams that do, in League of Legends, Valorant, Rocket League and chess, the release names no specific event at which the new jersey will first be worn.

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