Sidemen charity match proves importance of entertainment in sport
On Saturday afternoon at Wembley Stadium, 90,000 fans packed out the home of football for a charity match featuring online celebrities the Sidemen.
Having begun with games at Southampton in 2016 and Charlton’s The Valley, the Sidemen – a group of seven YouTubers who have banded together to grow their brand, and whose most notable member is Brit nominee and boxer KSI – upsized to West Ham’s London Stadium last year and this weekend filled the biggest stadium in Britain.
They raised over £4m for charity and had over 15m streams on their YouTube coverage – for context, around 11m people tuned into the Six Nations opener between France and Wales across Britain, Ireland and France.
Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi were nowhere to be seen and Premier League footballers didn’t make the starting XIs. Instead, influencer sensation IShowSpeed – who promoted the game on CBS’s Sports Golazo – joined the seven Sidemen and a host of other YouTube and online talent for the match.
So was the game just a regular charity occasion, like Soccer Aid or Comic Relief? Or does it demonstrate that sports audiences are changing, and that sometimes the sport itself is no longer the central reason to attend… sport?
“There’s so many variables to make the Sidemen able to do an event like this, but I don’t know who else in the world can really do it at the same scale,” Sidemen manager and Arcade Media co-founder Jordan Schwarzenberger tells Morning Wire.
“It’s not a commercial event. I think the charity nature of it is really important for the fans – it makes sure that you can build a higher level spectacle without needing to commercialise to such a degree that makes it just another commercial product.”
The future of sport
With a half-time show expected at the next Fifa World Cup final in 2026 – organised by Coldplay frontman Chris Martin – and the use of entertainment in women’s rugby, the Hundred cricket and the season launch of Formula 1 at the O2 last month, entertainment is fast becoming an even bigger part of how fans consume sport.
Jake Paul, who shot to fame as a YouTuber, fought Mike Tyson last year while even golf has lent into its split by staging challenges between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf players.
Misfits Boxing, founded by KSI and with Mams Taylor promoting the series, organises YouTube-based cards for large arenas.
Schwarzenberger says that it is a great example of how a mainstream sport like boxing has embraced social media and internet stars.
“They always understood that entertainment personalities built up drama, all of those things are fundamental to the game,” he adds.
“And now you see Turki [Alsheikh, Riyadh Season founder] trolling people on Twitter, and he’s becoming a creator himself. You’ve got Eddie Hearn and Frank Warren moulding into that sort of personality that’s out there through social media. It’s creative.
Sidemen showing the way
“Dana White’s TKO announcement [of a new boxing stable from the owners of UFC and WWE] is a massive step towards the entertainment-first sport landscape, which is an interesting shift.”
Saturday’s charity match combined the thrill of live sport with the necessity to entertain crowds, something Schwarzenberger, 27, insists is crucial going forward.
He cites Baller League – which will be shown on Sky Sports – and Kings League football as well as all-electric speedboat series E1 as organisations using celebrity to push their narrative.
“Ultimately, if you don’t grab people, if you don’t entertain them, if you don’t give them fun, then the sport is not going to get seen,” he says.
“Football isn’t winning over young people in the same way that it was, especially when I was growing up. And I don’t think it has that hold in the same way that it did, because it’s just a little bit lacking in entertainment and lacking in that other thrill.
“Sport is a form of entertainment that needs further entertainment.”
Some may look at the Sidemen charity match as they do the Hundred in cricket or the 6 Kings Slam in tennis. But the reality is that these modern takes on traditional sports are drawing their own crowds, often differing in profile to anorak fans.
It may not be for you, or the person next to you, but 90,000 tickets were shifted in three hours for Saturday’s YouTube clash. And that speaks volumes for the demand for a new approach to sport entertainment.