“One of the worst investments of my life”

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A YouTuber invested in esports team MAD Lions in 2018, but years later describes the decision as one of the worst investments of his life.

Who is the person you are talking about?

  • Guillermo Díaz Ibáñez (30), better known as Willyrex, is one of the biggest Spanish YouTubers
  • The Willyrex channel has 17.2 million subscribers. The YouTuber has 18.4 million subscribers on another channel called “TheWillyrex”.
  • Willyrex shows, among other things, gaming and reaction content on his channels, although he started around 12 years ago with games like CoD MW2 and Minecraft. However, he received a particularly large number of views with videos about GTA Online and Fortnite.
  • Willyrex recently published numerous videos about the party game “Golf it”

    • In October 2023, Willyrex founded the podcast “spicy4tuna” with three other Spanish content creators, which is available on its own YouTube channel. As part of the podcast, the 30-year-old spoke about his investment in e-sports and explains why it was one of the worst investments of his life (via YouTube).

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    What a bad investment was that? In the podcast, Willyrex explains that he has made some bad investments in his life. According to him, one of the worst things was investing in e-sports a second time and becoming co-owner of the “MAD Lions” team.

    The MAD Lions were one of the most followed e-sports teams in Spain at the time and achieved good results, according to our Spanish colleagues at 3DJuegos.

    Nevertheless, Willyrex explains in the podcast, the company behind the team experienced financial problems just a few months after his arrival. Shortly afterwards, the Canadian company OverActive Media took over the team.

    Willyrex says: “I came in a few months earlier at a much higher valuation and a team from Canada came and said, ‘My team is worth 100 million and yours is worth a million, now you have 0.0X% of mine Company’. I went from my MAD Lions team to becoming a 0.0% shareholder in a Canadian company.”

    In addition to the MAD Lions, OverActive Media also manages the Overwatch team “Toronto Defiant” and the CoD team “Toronto Ultra”.

    “It was like I was obliged to do something”

    Why was the investment so bad for him? As Willyrex explains in the podcast, it wasn’t the financial loss that was the problem, but the fact that he went from being a majority owner to someone who had little influence on the project. That he had to stand up for something that wasn’t his:

    It was so ridiculous that I was completely discouraged. The times I went to the events were very good at first, but then I stopped going. It was like I was obligated to do something. It was the worst feeling I’ve ever had in my life […] What I have bad memories of is promoting something that wasn’t mine […].

    Willyrex in the spicy4tuna podcast via YouTube

    Even though Willyrex is not satisfied with his involvement with the MAD Lions and even describes it in the podcast as “one of the worst investments” of his life, the team is still active today.

    Willyrex isn’t the only content creator investing in esports. Many YouTubers and streamers even create their own teams. One of them is Jeremy “Disguised Toast” Wang:

    Twitch streamer founds his own team, $1 million later criticizes e-sports: “Everyone loses a lot of money”

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