Real Madrid president Florentino Perez was wrong about the European Super League being a panacea for football’s problems. He was probably wrong about signing Kylian Mbappe. But, at least in part, he was right about 90-minute football matches being too boring for young people to watch.
If you teach, coach, or have a child of your own, you’ll already be aware that kids hate sitting still. If you’re yet to have this experience, perhaps take a moment to remember what you were like as a child.
Were you a quiet, obedient angel that sat meditatively in front of dull, goalless draws? Of course you were.
Children have always been balls of energy, but studies find that attention spans are getting shorter across all age groups, not just the young.
This isn’t because we have chosen to become deficient human beings.
It’s because the world around us has gotten a lot more stimulating, and because we actually prefer it that way.
Multiple surveys conducted by an array of sports rights-holders have shown that young people love sport just as much as previous generations. It’s just that now, in the 2020s, the one-dimensional experience of watching live sport has started to feel like a relic of a bygone era.
“It’s not that young people don’t have the attention span; they just need more to pique their interest and keep them attentive,” says Ed Abis, CEO of interactive broadcast tech company Dizplai. “That’s where Mr. Perez, who’s obviously a very successful man, wasn’t quite briefed in the right way.”
Perez’s off-the-cuff solution to the 90-minute problem was to make matches shorter – an idea that isn’t without its merits. Gerard Pique’s King’s League has earned a lot of praise for its ability to get children watching live football with 20-minute halves, much as its British predecessor Master’s Football did for young millennials that came before Gen Z and Alpha.
However, the buzz around King’s League isn’t just because the matches are shorter. The production is tailormade for interactive live streaming, interspersed with popular influencers seen on platforms like Twitch and Kick.
A 10-second watch will instantly tell you that the King’s League is loud, colourful content for kids that can’t sit still. And yet, a typical King’s League Twitch stream lasts for seven hours, with average watch-times close to 30 minutes per user.
This level of average watchtime mirrors the kind of viewership patterns seen for top esports tournaments and individual streamers such as Kai Cenat, which keep viewers engaged with live chat, digital item drops and a constant stream of interaction between on-screen talent and viewers.
If done well, viewership will stay rock solid over the course of broadcasts that can last up to 16 hours per day.
“At the moment, traditional sport is just taking the linear feed and sticking it on digital platforms, expecting that everyone’s going to think that’s fine,” Abis says. “That’s not how these content creators make content.”
The death of passive viewing
For those brought up on the dulcet tones of traditional broadcasters, a Kai Cenat stream is akin to a fever dream. His 14 million Twitch followers tune in to see chaos at all hours of the day and are almost never disappointed.
The US-based streamer is a pioneer of chaotic, interactive comedy, keeping viewers hooked and engaged with constant twists and turns planned out by his content team. Cenat even goes as far as to hire actors to perform for viewers while he sleeps in the background, earning donation and subscription money while the actors do the bidding of his audience.
Cenat’s content could not have existed in any other era, but his impact will be felt on live broadcasting for decades to come. His meteoric rise is proof that young people like to be active participants in the content they watch, rather than passive consumers.
Barrick Prince, former head of original sports content at Twitch, says that live sport is late to the interactive party and risks alienating a generation conditioned to being part of the show.
“The value proposition for passive viewing among young people just isn’t there,” Prince says. “They’ve been able to touch, share, forward, comment on every single bit of content they have experienced in their entire lives. The sports industry is asking them to sit on their hands, which is something they’ve never done.”
“We’re now in a user-centric economy and viewers have the power. They don’t want to be passive any more.”
Prince is now all-in on bringing sport to Twitch, Kick and beyond via his Creator Sports Network business, which pairs sports rights-holders with streamers and influencers. The resulting broadcasts are a glimpse into the future of live sports broadcasting, taking the unofficial watchalong model pioneered by Mark Goldbridge to an entirely different level.
In effect, Prince’s goal is to make live sports broadcasting more like Kai Cenat stream and less like Match of the Day.
“We feel like there’s a big opportunity to show these sports in an interactive way to a younger audience, get them involved in a two-way conversation and get them invested in the sport,” Prince explains. “They’re really coming at the sport through the eyes of their favourite creator.”
“Imagine if Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer got to answer live chat questions on Match of the Day? They could just have a screen behind them, where people could literally submit their questions live. It would be so easy for them to do and yet they won’t do it.”
Abis adds: “Radio has been doing this kind of thing for decades with phone-ins – they are inherently interactive and social. For whatever reason, linear television has never taken those learnings.”
In Brazil, the influencer-fronted
live sports broadcast is now an established part of the country’s media landscape.
Proof of concept
Prince is currently working to prove the concept of his Creator Sports Network with rights-holders in the US, Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, in Brazil, the influencer-fronted live sports broadcast is now an established part of the country’s media landscape.
Cazé TV, a free-to-watch YouTube and Twitch channel fronted by Brazilian streaming personality Casimiro, has carved a path for a brand new style of live sports broadcasting. It combines top-tier live football with the kind of energy and interactivity now expected by young viewers.
Produced and managed by agency LiveMode, the channel began as a last resort to broadcast a Vasco da Gama match in Brazil’s top football league. It has since grown to become an official broadcaster for the Fifa World Cup and the Olympic Games, and is now a key platform for brands to communicate with young Brazilian men.
“It was a combination of vision and necessity,” says Edgar Diniz, founding partner of LiveMode and a key figure behind Cazé TV. “We had the opportunity to show a Vasco game and Casimiro is a Vasco fan. We invited him to live-stream the game and if it worked and he liked it, then we could think of something bigger.”
Two years later and Cazé TV had broken YouTube live streaming records for its broadcasts of Brazil matches during the 2022 Fifa World Cup. A live stream of Brazil’s World Cup quarter-final against Croatia peaked at 6.5m viewers across video sharing platform YouTube and live-streaming platform Twitch, while other Brazil matches from the tournament peaked between four million and six million viewers.
Again, the Fifa World Cup broadcasts were something of a happy accident: LiveMode had originally planned to sell non-exclusive digital rights to a third party instead of exploiting them with Casimiro, but did not solicit a strong enough bid. Diniz credits Fifa’s bravery for allowing matches to be shown by an uncensored influencer, instead of insisting on a prestigious media group partner.
He explains: “There aren’t a lot of large sports bodies that would have taken such a risk, and such an innovative approach. We asked for a lot of freedom in terms of how to broadcast and the editorial tone of voice. If we brought streamers in and told them they couldn’t be themselves, it wouldn’t have worked. Fifa embraced it.”
“The combination of the broadcast structure, the production we brought and his own genius was a powerful combination. Our production team had the live match experience of formatting a show, but he’s the communication genius here and a crazy fan, too. His fresh approach and our experience was the key.”
LiveMode is mostly comprised of former executives of Esporte Interativo, a Brazilian sports broadcaster and streamer founded in 1999 and sold to media group Turner in 2015.
The agency’s traditional sports broadcasting know-how and relationships have helped Casimiro – himself a former Esporte Interativo content creator – convince the industry’s biggest rights-holders to take the biggest of risks.
“We’re now seeing the IOC and Uefa realising that they need to do something new, so they’re open to us,” says Diniz. “It’s the right time. If it were four years ago it wouldn’t fit. Everyone’s mindset was about migrating from pay-TV to ‘OTT’.”
“The new generation wants to watch and participate in a broadcast. What they feel with us is that they are watching the game with their friends. They are discussing, chatting, making jokes, and all of that is happening because they feel they are like Casimiro and the other guys on the broadcast.
“Although they don’t know him personally, he is their friend. He is not an expert voice talking down to them. The audience and Casimiro watch together.”
Reform, not revolution
The Cazé TV story is, at least for the time being, a uniquely Brazilian story. The country’s traditional pay-television market has rapidly shrunk as free-to-air and streaming become the dominant forms of sports consumption. As Brazilian broadcasters increasingly prefer to buy smaller packages of exclusive content, plenty of top-tier content is available for new entrants and experimental challengers.
Europe’s sports broadcasting market is a world away from Brazil: linear pay-television is still the dominant revenue generator for sports across the continent’s countries, which have smaller, localised advertising markets split by language.
Regardless, Prince believes that Europe will be forced to give into innovation as Generations Z and Alpha become tastemakers and billpayers – bills that won’t include high-price content subscriptions.
Prince says: “Everywhere is going to look like Brazil eventually. The big rights-holders all believe that non-interactive, direct-to-consumer products will be their saviour, and that everyone will pay them a subscription fee. The reality is that these younger generations don’t think that clicking a link on Reddit to a pirated feed from Asia is stealing. That’s just how you watch the game.”
Diniz is already having conversations about replicating the Cazé TV success story outside Brazil, but concedes that Brazil is currently the most fertile ground for such a project.
“Brazil is a huge advertising country, it’s very different from Europe. But rights-holders everywhere will be looking for new ways to reach fans out of necessity. We’re talking about the ones that don’t already have huge revenue coming from media rights. They have an opportunity to build new revenue lines and also to build a fan base looking toward the future.”
Abis believes necessity will be the mother of invention, and that the status quo will remain until top media executives call for a change.
“If it’s not coming from up on high that we need to do things in a different way, generally people will just keep doing the same thing until that thing’s not there anymore.”
