["Nations and Nationalism, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis study explores how esports audiences discursively construct Finnish nationality when spectating games of Counter‐Strike: Global Offensive during a major international tournament. The largest esports tournament broadcasts can attract tens or hundreds of thousands of viewers, who participate in the public debate surrounding the matches. In the empirical study, over 100.000 chat messages were filtered by a language model trained by the authors. The ensuing data were analysed qualitatively, focusing on how nationality is made relevant in multimodal chat interaction. The following five key types of talk were identified: (1) defining and debating the ‘Finnishness’ of key stakeholders, (2) cheering for ‘Finnish’ players and teams, (3) referencing current affairs related to Finland, (4) aggressive and hateful content constructing ‘Finnishness,’ and (5) humour and stereotypes related to ‘Finnishness.’ The findings contribute to the discussion on the sportification of esports and the way online publics participate in discursive construction of nationality.\n"]