After the success of the Kings League, Gerard Piqué is launching the Kings World Cup this Sunday in Mexico, which brings together 32 teams from around the world. Halfway between sport, e-sport and entertainment content for social networks, this seven-a-side football competition hopes to revolutionize the world of football, and too bad if this means putting entertainment before performance .
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Gerard Piqué had already tried to revolutionize tennis. The story quickly ended. Less than five years after the partnership with his company Kosmos with the International Tennis Federation (ITF), the Davis Cup formula Pique was put away in January 2023 by the ITF, the new version of the proposed competition not having met its audience and even less the enthusiasm of the players.
This failure, however, did not dampen the determination of the former FC Barcelona footballer to tackle his favorite sport, with – it must be admitted – much more success. In 2023, he is launching the Kings League, a competition on the border between sport, e-sport and entertainment content for social networks.
Fancy rules and viewership records on Twitch
First launched in Spain, the principle is as follows: twelve teams of seven football players mixing amateurs and former professionals compete on a small format pitch, all sprinkled with baroque rules such as the possibility of having recourse during the match has “special cards” that the captains of each team can play during matches of two times 20 minutes: exclude an opposing player for two minutes, obtain an automatic penalty or make the goals count double for two or five minutes…
Not much to do with the most popular sport in the world and yet, it is an understatement to say that the format has met with a certain success. The first day of the Kings League in January 2023 brought together 15 million spectators on Twitch. Because this is the particularity of the competition: it relies on the community power of platforms like Twitch, Youtube or TikTok by associating with the biggest streamers on the web who participate in the competition where they hold for some the role of team captain. The success was such that the final of the Spanish Kings League was held to a sold-out crowd at the Camp Nou in Barcelona, with 90,000 spectators, while recording a peak audience of 2.16 million people on Twitch.
Read alsoGerard Piqué: more than a footballer, a businessman
The success of the Spanish Kings League therefore gave ideas to Gerard Piqué who is launching this Sunday, May 26, the Kings World Cup, its version of the World Cup, by bringing together in Monterrey, Mexico, 32 teams who will compete to try to go win the world title. Once again, the competition intends to rely on the sounding board provided by social networks, but also on big names in world football who have agreed to take part in the competition from near or far.
Entertainment before the performance
The French team “Foot2rue” led by French streamer AmineMaTue will include, for example, former players Samir Nasri, Jérémy Ménez and Adil Rami in its ranks. Neymar will be the coach of the Brazilian team “Furia FC”, while Eden Hazard and his brother Thorgan will be present for the Belgian team. Francesco Totti will also be there for Italy. The icing on the cake is that the competition has the luxury of the participation of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who, although he will not play, has been given the honorary title of president of this Kings World Cup.
We will have understood, even if the team which wins the Kings World Cup will be given a nice check for a million dollars, the sporting interest of the event is relegated far behind many other priorities, the first of which ‘among them being to entertain the public. “ One of the reasons we started the Kings League is because I saw my kids watching a football game, and after ten minutes they were on their phones, their tablets, watching something else. Football competes with Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, TikTok. Everyone has their time limit. Football for 90 minutes is no longer as exciting “, said the former player last March at Sunday Times.
A format that finds its audience
From there to revolutionizing the most followed sport on the planet? Gerard Piqué seems convinced of this, he who believes that he “ you have to find ways to score more goals, or make sure that a match cannot end in a draw. […] A 90-minute match that can end 0-0 is very difficult for the new generation to understand “, he assures. It is hard to believe that the Kings League could take precedence over a professional sport whose number one concern remains performance, but it is clear that these new entertainment formats, which we have seen appear in France recently with the two editions of GP Explorer organized by YouTuber Squeezie and which use the mechanisms of sport and e-sport, have found their audience.
Even before it kicks off, the Kings World Cup is already shaping up to be a success. According to Gerard Piqué, almost all of the tickets for the Final Four of the competition which will take place in the BBVA stadium in Monterrey and its 53,000 seats have already been sold. Also a sign that the phenomenon goes beyond the simple framework of social networks, the M6 group has purchased the exclusive French rights to the Kings World Cup to broadcast the competition on its free streaming platform M6+. The group has also reportedly negotiated the rights to the French version of the Kings League which could arrive in France as early as February 2025. The development of the project is only in its early stages, the Kings League announced on May 14 that it had just raised nearly 60 million euros with the aim of launching national leagues in Europe, North America and Brazil by 2025, and reaching the Asian continent by 2026.