by Throw a spoiler and a sick flame decal on the quiet pastoral work of most farm sims and you get Farming Simulator League, an e-sport where rural machines roar to life and torpedo across barnyards to deliver hay bales while a timer trickles to the last seconds. These heavy, heavy vehicles aren’t quite the smooth hunks of steel you see in racing games, but they’re still capable of barreling across narrow bridges, performing tightly calibrated powerslides, and performing elegant slam dunks of said hay bales straight into the top floor of their sheds.
The latest season of the Farming Simulator League has seen teams harvest portions of golden crops while piloting their tough vehicles with the kind of finesse you’d expect to see in a Grand Prix. Agricultural esports has also seen big brands such as Trelleborg, Corteva and Bednar sponsoring events and participating in their own teams, for example two-time defending champions Team Trelleborg. The league has taken off in Europe (opens in a new tab)with live tournaments taking place around the continent and this season’s World Cup just wrapping up on the weekend of November 19-20. And after a nail-biting five-game showdown with French team New Holland (formerly known as The Fermiers Flamboyants), a team that threatened their dominance in the series of six online tournaments leading up to the World Championship, Team Trelleborg eventually emerged champions of the season, walking away with the € 20,000 in prize money.
All this hubbub may come as a surprise even to those familiar with Farming Simulator, a game known for the realistic, but perhaps mundane, pastoral work of growing crops, raising livestock and harvesting trees. But in the Farming Simulator League, athletes compete in teams of three to harvest wheat, press bales and deliver as many as possible within 15 minutes. Apart from the mechanical challenge of maneuvering these heavy machines around – just driving a harvester straight (opens in a new tab) has a bit of a learning curve – sharp strategizing is also required.
Like any eSports worth its salt, Farming Simulator League has a “pick and ban” phase. Team captains can choose which vehicles can be used during the match, throwing a spanner in the works for those who rely heavily on their preferred combines and balers. Trelleborg, for example, has to use an unwieldy JCB Fastrac 4220 in the match against New Holland due to the French team banning the more efficient front loader tractors such as the Massey Ferguson 7726.
There are also perks that can be selected before a match, and others scattered around the map that can turn the contest. For example, you can pick up an advantage that allows you to run faster than other players. Or you can swap your points multiplier with the other team’s, which turned the tide for New Holland in one of the tournaments this season, allowing the team to score more points per ball delivered.
These wild cards make the Farming Simulator League exciting, especially when both teams are evenly matched. “I would say that the matches that are decided at the last second – those are the good matches,” says Hanno “Beatmaster” Meier, one fifth of the Swedish team Trelleborg. Watching Trelleborg and New Holland deliver ball after ball in their last tournament was like watching a pirouette perfectly executed; their machines would skid up gusts of tire smoke as they swung toward the shed, dropping a bale at precisely the right moment before seamlessly returning to the field.
In the first round of this season’s sixth online tournament, both teams used similar tactics: slowing each other down by raising the bridges that offer a direct route to their respective barns. With the score differing by just a few points until the final seconds of the round, the usually unbeatable Team Trelleborg made several mistakes – at one point a player accidentally drove his harvester into a canal – which likely cost the team the win. Nevertheless, Trelleborg recovered quickly from the loss to secure two consecutive victories.
Describing the action doesn’t quite do it justice; you can watch the exciting match between the two teams yourself.
The athletes of Team Trelleborg have been looking forward to playing on a physical stage in front of an audience eventually – the typical e-sports experience has taken a back seat since the start of the pandemic. This past weekend marks the second time the current lineup of Team Trelleborg has competed in the World Championship (players from the previous team have joined other teams, such as Corteva Agriscience (opens in a new tab) and John Deere (opens in a new tab)).
We play our game and no matter what the opponent does, we are faster.
Jendrik “JayKay” Kluge, Team Trelleborg
Farming Simulator League hasn’t garnered the popularity of other eSports like Dota, League of Legends and Street Fighter, but its fans are incredibly devoted. In the league’s earliest days back in 2017, the eSports competition began as a simple ball stacking competition. – Initially, the organizers of Agritechnica, which is the largest agricultural fair in the world, approached us and asked if we could create a stand where we could give something to the younger audience there, says Martin Rabl, marketing manager at Farming Simulator developer Giant Software.
As the competition became more popular, Giants Software decided to adapt the competition to become a more team-based event. “It was a super niche [at first] because you could only play at Agritechnica at that time. That’s when we got a lot of other players saying, ‘Hey, we want to play a competitive-style game, too,'” says Rabl.
Highlights from FSL season 3 last year.
While Farming Simulator tried to recreate the actual labor and elbow grease of farm work as closely as possible, it is clear that the spectacle of the Farming Simulator League is about as representative of real farming as caber throwing (opens in a new tab) is to be a lumberjack.
Real crops tend not to materialize quickly after you harvest the field; you have to sow them again and wait a year or so to harvest them again. But the machines used in the competition are true to their real counterparts, with some teams leaning towards one or the other according to their strategies. “For combine harvesters, for example, there are differences, such as what kind of capacity they have,” says Rabl. “There’s a baler that’s quite popular because it can hold more bales in it than the others, so you can collect more of them at once. There’s a certain strategy involved in picking them, sometimes they also have a downside. It may be that the capacity is higher, but they are slow. But at least you have to unload less often. Your strategy has to be developed around that.”
Team Trelleborg often works with speed first. “At least for tournaments, we always watch the live feed so we know what our opponents are doing [at] that moment. We prepare for what they do… but sometimes in this season it is [about being] fast,” says Team Trelleborg’s Jendrik “JayKay” Kluge. “We play our game and no matter what the opponent does, we’re faster.”
Rather than favoring a particular tactic (“We have a lot of strategies,” Meier says), they prefer to adjust their style of play based on what the other team is doing. That’s how Trelleborg defeated their toughest competition this season. New Holland’s tactic was to increase their points multiplier as much as possible, which is affected by the amount of grain that must first be harvested from the fields and then delivered to the silo. New Holland would then deliver its bales to the shed just when this multiplier was at its peak. While this helped them win their first match against Trelleborg at the World Championship, it was a strategy that Trelleborg used against them in subsequent rounds, allowing the defending champions to secure yet another resounding victory.
If you’re keen to become a competitive farmer yourself, all you need to do is download the free Farming Simulator League Arena DLC – provided you have a copy of Farming Simulator 19 – and access a dedicated server running the DLC against a small fee (opens in a new tab). If you need teammates, you can probably find them via the Farming Simulator League Discord (opens in a new tab). Practice sessions, called scrims, allow you to build experience competing against both novice and experienced players. According to Rabl, this accessibility sets the league apart from other esports competitions.
Well, that and the tractors.
“When I watch the FSL games, I just know I couldn’t do it,” says Rabl. “It looks easy, but it’s like Formula 1 driving.”
Given the team’s track record, it is no surprise that Trelleborg have emerged victorious this season. Still, the unexpected arrival of underdogs New Holland has ensured that upcoming seasons of the league will be incredibly exciting to watch – especially as eSports events gradually return. While this season’s World Championship is over and the next season of the Farming Simulator League takes place months later, it’s still not too late to catch up on the Farming Simulator League frenzy. You can watch all the crazy action of Farming Simulator League Season 4 on Twitch (opens in a new tab)or just jump to the season highlights on Farming Simulator League’s Youtube channel (opens in a new tab).
