When it comes to footballers and businessmen, gone are the days when players would live hand in hand after retirement. They have become extremely business savvy, using their ridiculous amounts of money during their playing days to prepare themselves well for retirement.
Perhaps no other player symbolizes that new era of business-oriented football more than Gerard Pique.
As the head of Kosmos, he not only has his football club FC Andorra, FootTheBall covered only by insider access, but he also has various other businesses developing and there could be, with his personality, a political role waiting for him at FC. Barcelona again.
However, how would it sound if someone said that even a role at FC Barcelona would not be the crowning glory of his reign? It sounds a bit far-fetched and exaggerated, but that’s exactly what the Kings League is.
It is often said that evolution always changes the answer to a problem for the better but evolution completely changes the question asked. The Kings League is Gerard Pique’s evolution.
Here’s a jump into the gem of Pique’s business empire.
What is Kings League?
In a race between billionaires to snap up football clubs as the live sports economy appears to be the only part of the market immune to the bursting of the bubble, Pique has also stepped into the situation.
He bought FC Andorra, seeing the potential of having a team representing the whole country. He has seen success from both of them, as they have now moved up to the second division. However, his true passion arose with the Kings League.
The Kings League is a seven-a-side football competition based in Barcelona that was started by Pique.
At its heart, the Kings League could be summed up as “street football for sale” but that would be underestimating the genius of it all.
According to Joe Pompliano, sports and business expert, Pique and his business partners bought an abandoned warehouse in Barcelona in 2022. They hold open tryouts to screen the best talent. So far, common.
Then came the revolution. The presidents of the clubs that have joined the Super League for a long time have said that their biggest concern about modern football is that this 90-minute game is no longer enough to keep the attention of the young generation. Enter Kings League, a 40-minute game.
Fan participation has been at the heart of the league since its inception. Its set of rules was created through a voting process conducted on social media. This led to some really wonky rules coming into the game.
Laws like “Enigma”, an unnamed lucha libre masked player, can be used by the team that owns that dangerous card and be part of the revolution.
Football fans hated it but Pique and his colleagues identified the target audience for their product and proceeded to market it to them without any outside noise.
Other rules such as unlimited substitutions, “secret weapons” such as a goal that should be doubled in two minutes, the removal of the opposing player for a set time, and others made for a dynamic game where the level of unpredictability has been increased to him. very high.
Pique had a product, he knew his audience, and he had a vision. Now there’s a part about marketing it and actually getting that product to the target audience, more than them if possible. This is where the genius of his mind came into play.
Embrace the youth
Influences like iShowSpeed have become the fabric of football culture. It doesn’t matter anymore whether you are a “true fan” or a “local fan”. Content creators like him are bringing another generation of fans to the injured party.
Pique saw that there was a market for him to enter here. From there came the idea of choosing broadcasters to collaborate with in their teams. He would not run a system like MLS where the league owns all the teams. And he would not allow a select few to control the goals of the league like European football owners.
Their main priority was to get eyeballs on their product, which is relevant to their target audience, and this was the perfect way to do so.
It’s a marketing mantra
Where most business organizations think of revenue as their foundation and build from that point upwards, Pique flipped the script. They were very focused on getting high viewers because the money would follow later if they had successful followers.
Partnering with broadcasters did part of the job, allowing social media to move forward. The Super League champions have an unheard weakness in their argument that no one seems to notice that football is on the rise because it is becoming more and more inaccessible.
The fans who play have become citizens in the lower class to spread the rights and those who are out of control.
Pique disrupts the program by showing all the Kings League games for free on all social media platforms. By January 2023, the tournament had amassed 238 million views on TikTok and Twitch and the first game was a trailblazer in its own right, attracting 800,000 viewers.
Since then, viewership has continued to trend upward. In the second round, viewers increased to 945,000 which increased to 1.3 million in the third round.
The Camp Nou played host to the league’s biggest sell-out as fans were willing to shell out anywhere between $10-$65 for the privilege of attending. Pique’s genius had come full circle. From putting his product in front of every possible eye at the time for free, he had captured a market that he could now begin to profit from.
The future of the Kings League
The power of this is limitless because quite simply, there are millions of content creators in the world who have their own legions of followers ready to enter any new field their idols venture into.
In England, someone like KSI can be a part owner of “Kings League UK” and soon he will bring hundreds of millions of fans. The same goes for any other country and since the matches are currently broadcast, with the exception of the Camp Nou final, the geographical limit is completely removed.
Already, the league has changed from a single competition to the Kings Cup which, like domestic cup competitions, is a knockout competition. The next generation is being groomed through the “Prince Cup”, where young children enter and hopefully have a future in the Kings League.
There are already Kings Leagues in Italy, Brazil, Japan, and many others, with the main goal of having a Kings League World Cup where the best teams from each region compete for the world title, similar to FIFA. The world cup.
Pique has grown his contacts in the process, including Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Ronaldinho in his project. Ibrahimovic has become the President of the Kings League Italia, and Ronaldinho will be the Chairman of one of the teams in the upcoming Brazilian version of the tournament.
In short, it can enter into a virtuous cycle of expansion that drives revenue that drives further expansion and so on.
As mentioned earlier, some were changing the answer to the question and thinking about how to squeeze more profit in football. Pique has developed a new game, a new marketing strategy, and is now seeing the fruits of changing the question completely.
