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Gerard Piqué’s New League Wants To Reinvent Soccer By Partnering With Popular Streamers

Sep 18, 2023

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Today At A Glance:

Gerard Pique’s new soccer league, the Kings League, is disrupting soccer as we know it with a completely new style of play. But what exactly is it? How do they make money? And are people actually watching the matches? This newsletter will break down the upstart soccer league and what it could mean for the future of sports.

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Friends,

More than 92,000 people packed Barcelona’s Camp Nou earlier this year. These fans paid $10 to $64 to attend, and the match generated millions of dollars in ticket sales. Celebrities were dropped off at midfield by a helicopter, and FC Barcelona president Joan LaPorta danced in the stands while music reverberated throughout the stadium.

But this wasn’t a La Liga match. FC Barcelona wasn’t in town. And the UEFA Champions League didn’t start for another several months.

Instead, this was the Kings League — a new 7-on-7 amateur soccer league in Spain founded by former Barcelona legend Gerard Pique.

The Kings League is only a year old, and the rules barely resemble traditional soccer. Players aren’t even professional and are paid just a few hundred dollars per match.

Still, the Kings League has gained significant traction, and many people think they are building the future of professional sports.

The Kings League was born in July 2022 when FC Barcelona legend Gerard Pique was walking to lunch with business partner and now Kings League CEO Oriol Querol.

“We were discussing the problems of traditional football,” [Oriol] Querol told The Athletic. “Ninety minutes has become a long time, and sometimes a match can end 0-0. In a Champions League final, for 20 minutes, there can be no content.”

Pique and Querol’s main concern was that a younger generation of football fans wanted more action in a quicker, condensed format.

“I can tell you from my own experience, I have two kids,” Gerard Pique told The Athletic. “They need everything quicker, it’s difficult for them to concentrate on anything for long. But, they can also be involved in three different things at the same time. We should not force them to change their consumption habits. We have to adapt ourselves and our products to what the audience wants and likes.”

So Pique and Querol thought of it like a video game and set out to reinvent the sport.

They purchased a refurbished warehouse near Barcelona’s port to host games. They posted an application for players on their website, drawing 11,000 applicants and eventually picking 180 players to enter a draft like you see in the NFL or NBA.

And most importantly, the Kings League worked with fans to create a new set of rules.

For example, the Kings League is 7-on-7 rather than 11-on-11. Kings League matches last just 40 minutes across two halves rather than 90 minutes. There are unlimited substitutions, rather than just five per team. And yellow and red cards are still a thing, of course. But players who receive a yellow or red card are sent to a “sin bin,” like ice hockey, where they must wait two to five minutes before rejoining their team.

Furthermore, all King League games are played on the same day (Sundays). Each roster has just 12 players — 7 starts, 3 bench players, and 2 wildcards (guest players).

And if that wasn’t enough, before each match, coaches select an envelope with a “secret weapon” that can be used at any point of the match. This includes things like double goals (goals count as 2 points for 2 minutes), removing a player (teams can remove an opposing player from the game for 2 minutes), and center penalty kicks (the striker gets to take a penalty kick from midfield 1v1 versus the goalkeeper).

But the smartest thing that the Kings League did came with its distribution strategy.

Rather than creating a single entity structure where Gerard Pique and his partners run all the teams, they strategically picked streamers to partner with on the project.

Each streamer has millions of followers on platforms like Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, and they have helped the league acquire 13 million followers.

Kings League Social Media Metrics

This streamer ownership model is working so well because anyone in the world can watch Kings League matches for free. That’s right, you don’t need cable TV, a streaming service, or pay-per-view packages. Instead, the Kings League streams all of its matches for free on Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok, using its own channels and also simulcasting the matches (commercial free) on the streamer’s channels too.

This helped the Kings League draw 800,000 viewers on Twitch and YouTube for its first-ever match. And in January 2023, the Kings League amassed 238 million views on TikTok and Twitch, more than every other traditional European football league combined.

This strategy provided the league with a built-in audience from day one. And while it’s true they are sacrificing lucrative broadcasting rights, the league can make up for it through sponsorship deals with companies like Adidas, Gatorade, and Spotify.

What is Pique's Kings League? Chicharito, golden cards, more - ESPN

Now, it will take some time to see how this plays out. Gerard Pique says the league was profitable in its first year, but let’s wait and see how year two goes before we crown it a winner.

Still, I’m excited about this project. The Kings League isn’t designed to compete with the world’s biggest professional soccer leagues — it’s an entirely different model.

Gerard Pique and his partners understand the size and scale of the digital streaming audience. The league is extremely cheap to set up and operate because player salaries are low, and everyone plays in the same location. And any financial upside they give up by ditching broadcasting rights, they can make up through international expansion.

That’s because soccer is a global game, and the genius part behind the Kings League is that expansion is dependent on language, not location.

So look for Pique to partner with English streamers, French streamers, Arabic streamers, Portuguese streamers, Russian streamers, and Japanese streamers to start other versions of the league.

If you enjoyed this breakdown, please consider sharing it with your friends.

I hope everyone has a great day. We’ll talk on Wednesday.

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