The Kings World Cup is the culmination of the second year of the Kings Leagues’ existence: A global event that pulls together the best players of the Kings League InfoJobs, Kings League Americas Santander, and a pool of wildcard competitors from around the globe for a 32-team football tournament hosted in Mexico. Under the watchful eye of former pro football player Zlatan Ibrahimović, the teams are vying for the title of the first-ever Kings World Cup champions, a $1M USD grand prize, and, of course, the trophy itself.
For those uninitiated readers, the Kings World Cup brings together top talent from the world of professional football, streaming, and even newly drafted amateur players for a 7-a-side competition. Having begun in Spain under the direction of Gerard Piqué, the tournament has successfully captured the attention of a younger generation of football fans around the world.
With this new global arena, it’s worth looking at the success of the opening day of the Kings World Cup to get a first insight into the popularity of the event on live-streaming platforms.
Football Fans Around the World Tune In for The Kings World Cup
There was a massive turnout for the Kings World Cup’s debut on the 26th of May. In just one day, the Kings World Cup generated 5.6M hours watched with a jaw-dropping peak viewership of 1.2M. The crossover of footballers and streamers from different corners of the globe no doubt saw diverse fanbases tuning into the event. Piqué’s strategy of shorter match times and secret weapon cards (such as the ability to temporarily remove an opposing player from the pitch) has successfully gamified football and made it more palatable to the online generation. It’s worth noting that technically the Kings World Cup had a preliminary event on the 25th of May as well, a Redemption Round, which itself brought in 1.7M hours watched.
On the topic of mega-popular streamers, the roster includes massive names such as ibai and Rivers from Kings League InfoJobs, Mercedes Roa and WestCOL from Kings League Americas Santander, and Gaules, Junichi Kato, and SHoNGxBoNG (SXB) from wildcard qualifiers that took place in other regions. SXB claimed the title of the most-watched streamer for the Kings World Cup on its opening day, bringing in 991K hours watched from just two and a half hours of airtime. This far outpaced the official Kings League Twitch channel which had just 423K hours watched during the day.
With the phenomenal success of the Kings League format, the tournament is confirmed to be expanding to France in 2025. For now though, there are still four more days of action left in the Kings World Cup, including the grand final on the 8th of June. Stream Hatchet will cover the performance of the tournament as a whole and the grand final in the coming days.
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