Gerard Piqué has at all times been an concepts man. He has, at varied occasions, had concepts about industries as disconnected as isotonic sports activities drinks and worldwide tennis tournaments. He has invested within the sun shades enterprise and the cellphone online game business. He has dabbled in media rights and soccer group possession and natural burgers.
For a very long time, Piqué did all of that whereas additionally being one of many standout soccer gamers of his era, a cornerstone on a sequence of Barcelona squads that harvested glory in industrial portions and a key element on a Spanish nationwide group that gained a World Cup and a European Championship. Excelling at soccer, although, was by no means sufficient.
“One of many first issues he mentioned to me was that he had completed coaching by 12,” mentioned Nicolas Julia, the founding father of the digital sports activities platform Sorare. “A few of his teammates preferred to play video video games. Some had been blissful hanging out with their households. He beloved to go to the workplace and construct one thing.”
He was pushed to take action, those that have labored with him say, as a result of he knew that soccer wouldn’t final perpetually. “I believe he noticed a whole lot of his teammates retire and don’t have anything to do,” mentioned Javier Alonso, a former colleague. “They had been solely 35 however had no actual life besides consuming in good eating places and taking part in padel. He didn’t need that.”
Piqué was effectively suited to his aspect hustle. He’s not, by all accounts, a lot given to sleep. He’s a pure networker, a frequent and instinctive schmoozer. His decade-long relationship with the pop singer Shakira gave him a profile exterior sports activities. He has a thoughts one affiliate described with the Spanish phrase “inquieto”: stressed, curious, maybe only a contact simply distracted. He’s way more versatile than could be anticipated of somebody so well-known, Alonso mentioned, including, “He’s blissful to take heed to specialists.”
Certainly, Piqué discovered his aspect profession so rewarding that late final yr he determined to deliver it entrance and middle. A few weeks earlier than the beginning of the World Cup, he declared Barcelona’s subsequent sport can be his final. Enterprise had “by no means been an afterthought for him,” Julia mentioned. Now, he needed to go all in.
Slightly than match his work round his coaching schedule, Piqué now devotes a lot of his time to Kosmos, the funding car he established in 2018 with the assistance of capital from Hiroshi Mikitani, the founding father of the Japanese e-commerce large Rakuten, a former Barcelona shirt sponsor.
He had used it to put money into areas “he understands probably the most,” as Julia put it, normally on the intersection of sports activities and expertise. There was a manufacturing arm, centered largely on sports activities documentaries, and an athlete administration wing. He had arrange an e-sports group and brought over the operating of F.C. Andorra, a minor league soccer membership in Spain.
There have been successes: Sorare has grown exponentially since his funding; F.C. Andorra has been promoted to Spain’s second tier for the primary time; and Koi, his e-sports franchise, has change into a significant participant.
His two greatest performs, although, have been wreathed in controversy. In 2020, Kosmos helped organize a deal to stage the Spanish Tremendous Cup in Saudi Arabia. When it emerged that Piqué, then an energetic participant, had reportedly acquired a $25.9 million fee, each he and the Spanish soccer federation needed to insist there was nothing unlawful concerning the association.
Then, this yr, the Worldwide Tennis Federation prematurely ended his most respected, high-profile mission: a $3 billion, 25-year take care of Kosmos, signed in 2018, to show the Davis Cup right into a World Cup-style occasion. Either side have subsequently threatened to sue the opposite.
These setbacks, although, haven’t discouraged Piqué. As Alonso, a former chief government of the corporate, as soon as mentioned of Kosmos: “What we do right here is Gerard goals, and we attempt to make these goals a actuality.” His newest dream is an formidable one. Piqué needs to take the sport that made him a star, and make it higher.
Waning Consideration
The way forward for soccer appeared to Piqué whereas he was on his strategy to lunch. Not a lot the nice particulars: the dodgeball-style kickoffs, the key weapons and the visitor stars disguised by lucha libre masks all got here later. However by the point he had completed his 15-minute stroll from his workplace in Barcelona to the restaurant, the large image was clear in his thoughts.
Soccer’s central downside, as Piqué identified it, was this: For an viewers raised on a weight loss program of bite-size content material and guided by the moment satisfaction algorithms of YouTube and Twitch and TikTok, 90 minutes is definitely fairly a very long time.
The standard soccer sport, he determined, accommodates far too many alternatives for eyes to wander: throw-ins, say, or groups getting their marking schemes proper throughout corners. Youthful viewers, Piqué was satisfied, wouldn’t stand for that. The game he had at all times beloved must adapt.
How? He and Oriol Querol, the chief government of Kosmos, spitballed concepts on their lunchtime stroll. Soccer needs to be shorter, for one. It needed to decrease the pure pauses, or discover a strategy to fill them. It needed to copy and undertake the rhythms and options of video video games and streaming and actuality tv to fulfill the viewers of their pure habitat.
By the point Piqué and Querol arrived for lunch, they’d the define of an thought. Inside a couple of months, it will have a type: the Kings League, a seven-a-side competitors staged in an indoor area in Barcelona. Its dozen groups are largely made up of former gamers, and owned and run by among the nation’s most distinguished streamers.
By the metrics Piqué, Querol and their colleagues care about, it has been an awesome success. It accrued some 238 million views on TikTok in January — extra, Querol identified, than all of Europe’s conventional leagues mixed. Greater than two million folks watched some or all of a single spherical of video games on the finish of February on Twitch, TikTok and YouTube.
Its Closing 4-style playoffs, held on March 26, occurred within the significantly grander surrounds of Camp Nou, the stadium the place Piqué spent 14 years as a cornerstone of an all-conquering Barcelona group. The steep stands had been full of 92,000 ticket-buying followers.
That recognition has not been universally welcomed. Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, has been probably the most distinguished, outspoken critic. The Kings League, he has mentioned, is just not a critical rival to his competitors. It’s only a “circus,” he contends, crammed with “streamers dressed up like clowns.”
Piqué has been unmoved. The standard “product of soccer is outdated,” he mentioned in response to Tebas. It’s in determined want of “extra stimulating guidelines” to draw and have interaction a brand new era of followers. He knew as he went to lunch that soccer needed to change. The Kings League is his try to vary it.
Enigma
On the flip of the yr, a couple of months after their relationship ended, Shakira launched a music that contained a variety of extraordinarily thinly veiled critiques of Piqué. Probably the most barbed centered on his obvious infidelity. In a single line, the singer accused him of buying and selling “a Ferrari for a Twingo.”
A few days after the music got here out, together with his nascent competitors nonetheless aggravating all the proper folks, Piqué duly turned up on the league’s headquarters in Barcelona on the wheel of a tiny white Renault Twingo. As he climbed, a bit of uneasily, out of the automobile, he grinned on the handful of photographers ready for him. His smile betrayed a confidence that his joke would land.
The transfer was typical of the advertising technique he adopted for the primary season of the Kings League. He was not essentially above turning his private life right into a promotional instrument if it’d generate curiosity: In reference to a different line in the identical music, suggesting he had swapped a “Rolex for a Casio,” he would later declare (sarcastically) that the Japanese watchmaker had come on board as a sponsor.
He was blissful to stoke controversy, too, even when it acted as an open invitation to the league’s critics. In an early spherical of video games, one group featured a thriller participant, clad in a masks to cover his identification and registered solely as Enigma. The participant was, the Kings League let or not it’s recognized, presently employed by a group in La Liga. (This was not strictly true.) The infamy was value it for the intrigue.
These confected dramas may appear to bear out Tebas’s evaluation of the Kings League as a circus, one that’s not a lot a pioneering imaginative and prescient of the longer term as a veterans’ seven-a-side league garlanded by novelties and promoted with gimmicks.
Its evident recognition, although, warrants better reflection. It has, because the sight of the heaving stands of Camp Nou made clear, discovered an viewers. A lot of that may be attributed, in fact, to the presence not solely of Piqué, Sergio Agüero and Iker Casillas, all of whom function group presidents, but additionally the likes of Ibai Llanos, the Spanish streamer, and Gerard Romero, a wildly standard on-line soccer journalist.
“The streamers had been the important thing,” Querol mentioned. “You can also make a case that Ibai is probably the most well-known individual in Spain now.”
Viewers who’ve tuned in to see them, although, have on the very least not been deterred by the “extra stimulating guidelines,” drawn from a wide selection of sources, that Piqué and his colleagues consider are important for soccer to proceed to flourish.
The idea of a participant draft comes straight from American sports activities. Others are extra esoteric: Kings League kickoffs, which function each groups charging en masse for the ball, are drawn from water polo, and it has revived an strategy to penalties final seen in Main League Soccer within the Nineteen Nineties. (It’s telling that one function inherited from old-school soccer is a postseason switch market: Piqué and Kosmos have recognized that no person is bored of switch rumors.)
“We took some issues from e-sports, too,” mentioned Querol, citing not solely the choice to stream every part earlier than, throughout and after video games, but additionally a “complete entry” strategy wherein viewers can hear what referees and gamers are saying.
“Then we took issues like every group having a secret weapon in every sport, one thing they’ll use at any time when they assume it might need probably the most impression, whether or not it’s a penalty or an additional participant, from video video games,” Querol added. “However none of it’s static. It’s fixed reflection. We modify no matter we will change.”
That course of continued by way of the season. When Querol and his group seen that video games tended to float on the finish of the primary half, they began reducing the variety of gamers on the sphere at that exact second. Something, in different phrases, to maintain the viewers on its toes, to make sure that one thing was occurring, to cease the attention from drifting and the thumb from scrolling.
“It’s sport,” Querol mentioned. “It wouldn’t work if the soccer was not of a excessive commonplace. That’s actually necessary.” However that’s not the one consideration. In his view, as in Piqué’s, soccer can not simply be soccer anymore. “The precedence,” he mentioned, “needs to be the spectacle.”
That, maybe, is the purpose that every one these critics who dismissed the Kings League have missed. It could be a circus. However Piqué may reply that there’s nothing improper with being a circus. Circuses are standard. They draw a crowd, they maintain the gaze, as a result of no person is ever fairly positive what’s coming subsequent.