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The Baller League promises an ‘authentic’ experience to younger fans - but it also represents a very real threat to football as we know it.
Your reaction to the BBC’s recent promotional campaign for the forthcoming Baller League UK, a six-a-side football tournament which begins in March, will probably vary depending on your age.
For those longer in the tooth, it’s unlikely that its mish-mash of former pros, YouTubers and planned gimmicks (such as new rules being added towards the ends of halves, like long-range goals counting double) will resonate all that well. The younger audience, however – those that the organisers are actually targeting – might be rather more intrigued.
John Terry and Alan Shearer are among the former players who will act as managers or coaches in the Baller League.John Terry and Alan Shearer are among the former players who will act as managers or coaches in the Baller League.
John Terry and Alan Shearer are among the former players who will act as managers or coaches in the Baller League. | Getty Images for Premier League
It will be tempting for members of the older generations to dismiss any success that the Baller League may enjoy as faddish, little more than an indicator of the differing tastes of generations, or even to dismiss it as the kind of low-grade entertainment which gets aimed at kids with allegedly shortened attention spans (as so much digital content is tediously portrayed) or even people stupid enough to want to watch anything involving the staggeringly irritating streamer IShowSpeed, who will helm the American edition despite past allegations of misogyny.
But once you get past the content creators and finish wondering why they thought that getting John Terry involved would be a good idea, the concepts behind its creation serve as both an indicator of the future direction of sports coverage and as a warning to those in positions of power within football – and other sports – that the ways the game is broadcast and presented no longer hold up.
“Sport is no longer as easy as just saying 'look, we're here now, come and watch us,'” claims Felix Starck, the German who founded the Baller League along with Mats Hummels and former Arsenal striker Lukas Podolski.
"That's just not how sport works any more. It needs to be exciting, and it needs to be authentic. Those are the two words that we always use at Baller League."
Baller League is, by its very contrived nature, stretching the definition of ‘authentic’. Their marketing spiel can include the word as many times as it likes, but this is a league which will feature Luis Figo managing one team while streamers The Sidemen manage the other, as goalkeepers are prevented from using their hands for the last three minutes – another genuine example of the rules which will be in place at the end of games.
But Starck’s first statement rings true. Football has, for a long time now, assumed that its very existence will beget a continuous stream of new generations of fans for the traditional model. It has apparently not occurred to FIFA, the FA, or any other governing body, that the next generation of supporters might turn elsewhere – but they are.
That isn’t to say that young people aren’t getting interested in football anymore. They’re still playing it in the playground and at the local park, and support is still being passed down from one generation to the next much as it always has. The way that young people watch football, however, appears to be changing.
A report in The Financial Times, released in May, draws from YouGov data to show that young people are following football very differently than used to be the case. While 75% of people aged 55 or more watch live football matches on television, that drops to barely more than 30% of those aged 18-24. Instead of watching traditional football, a great many young fans are consuming the sport via streaming and social media.
Of course, very little ‘real’ football is available via streaming services. So instead, they are watching the content put out independently by streamers, whether that means watching gamers play FIFA on Twitch or, as may well prove the be the case, by watching a string of popular creators hosting the Baller League, which will be played between ex-pros, released academy players and futsal players, or whoever else might impress at a trials event.
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For years, top-level football has hidden away behind a paywall, whether that’s Sky Sports, TNT Sport, or their equivalents in other countries. In the past, that didn’t change the way people followed football all that much because there wasn’t a meaningful alternative. Now, there is, and it’s slowly taking over while the traditional power brokers of football do nothing.
It’s worth noting that amidst all the nonsense about ‘authenticity’ one thing emphasised by Starck is the fact that the league will be free to watch: “The old way of doing football, with exclusive TV deals and a few big clubs, is out of date. Baller League is here to make the game exciting, accessible, and real for today’s audiences.”
Harry Hesp, the Baller League’s marketing director, makes the same point: “By using platforms like Twitch and YouTube, we’re making sure our fans can access content for free, whenever they want.”
All of this isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, of course. It is free entertainment and access to football in some form, and the Baller League may well prove to be perfectly enjoyable, especially in the case of the UK version, whose ‘president’ is streamer, soft drink merchant and occasional boxer KSI, a choice which gives our edition a public face who has the major advantage of being less repulsive than IShowSpeed.
It’s definitely great that players who narrowly missed out on the professional game will get a chance to earn some money (well, £400 per game, anyway, which is the amount on offer to the lucky few) and perhaps pick up a little dose of celebrity that could lead to further opportunities down the line.
But it’s also the start of a challenge to the traditional order. Football clubs have always survived quite happily behind a paywall because there are plenty of people willing and able to buy tickets, and the community and family connections that bind supporters to their teams run very deep. But what happens if the next generation finds an alternative, and they don’t wish to buy those tickets any more?
More concerningly, what happens when the generations who happily pay to watch football on Sky Sports and its ilk pass away and are replaced by a generation who aren’t in the habit of spending their money that way? What happens when the bottom falls out of the television broadcast market?
KSI is among the popular streamers involved in the project.KSI is among the popular streamers involved in the project.
KSI is among the popular streamers involved in the project. | Getty Images
Somewhere down the line – a good few years distant, but not all that many in the grand scheme of things – a major economic issue looms. If the younger generation doesn’t develop the habit of consuming football through the traditional channels, then they will collapse and with it the foundation of the sport’s colossal economy. If governing bodies don’t act – and the most obvious thing to do would be to make at least some football free-to-air or to find ways to put football in front of young fans’ faces on the platforms they actually use – then things could go south in a very dangerous fashion. With so much of football’s wealth wrapped up in traditional broadcast deals, the worst case scenario is disastrous.
In the meantime, the Baller League and others like it will move to fill the void. Whether you appreciate it or have any interest in watching it, its likely impact - and its warning - cannot be ignored. It’s easy to imagine that plenty of the older, greyer heads governing football will be tempted to shrug it off as a novelty, but doing so could be deeply dangerous for the game as we know it. This is football as entertainment first and sport second, but more importantly it is football offered up in the way that younger viewers want to digest it. It could be the shape of things to come if the old model doesn’t eventually embrace change.
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