hookyAlso, pay to play generates better competition, since there's more risk. In ESEA, you automatically lose your premium/league fee money if you drop out; in free leagues, nothing happens. You have just as much money as before. League fees keep competition up towards the higher ends of each division.
Normally, you would pay to play in a P2P league because of the quality of servers, organisation, customer service, cheat free environment etc. This is what you should get when you pay up. You get value out of paying other than the mere possibility of winning more money. There's nothing wrong with pay to play.
However, when I played in the only season where ESEA operated in Europe, everything was basically a trainwreck and it was all ESEA's fault. I've NEVER played in such a disorganised league, and I've played in many free leagues. Three weeks delay of the season, servers weren't working when the season finally started, when the server issue was fixed there were no server available suddenly, ESEA doesn't give a fuck and forces us to play four officials in one week, and then the BTC scandal happens again. The competition was non-existant because nobody bothered to play four matches a weeks and would rather fold (because the league was at this point a joke, there was no reason to not drop once you weren't able to reach play-offs anymore). Meanwhile the ESEA staff posted dumb shit on TFTV to everyone who complained, it really showed that they don't really give a fuck about TF2.
So yeah, I basically paid them to fuck me up in as many ways as they possibly could think of. It still gives me a headache thinking about this, which is why I think they are fucking crooks.