On the outskirts of Barcelona, Spain, hundreds of amateur soccer players attended the draft of a new sports competition called the Queens League.
One of them was 20-year-old Paula Moreno Rincón, who struggled to explain what this new competition is about.
“It’s a new world,” she said. “It’s soccer, but with very different rules.”
Rincón was not only talking about the pitch being smaller, with fewer players, or games shorter and more intense. She meant “very different,” as in a giant dice being thrown in the middle of the field to decide how many players can play, or secret cards that coaches can play at will, to eject rivals, earn a penalty kick or make goals count double.
The women’s Queens League is the follow-up to the Kings League, which only launched in January, but has already lured millions of online viewers in the Spanish-speaking world. The game is loosely based on soccer, but immersed in video game culture and reality TV antics.
In Barcelona, the second season of the Kings League kicks off the first weekend of May alongside the first season of the Queens League. This summer, the Prince Cup will launch for kids ages 9 to 11.
The Kings League also plans to expand internationally, and a new league has been confirmed in Brazil, with soccer superstars Ronaldinho and Neymar, Jr. as team presidents.
Most of the Kings League games are streamed from an indoor soccer field on the outskirts of Barcelona, where the draft of the Queens League took place.
However, the Kings League final was played at the Camp Nou stadium, the biggest in Europe, in front of more than 90,000 fans, and with over 2 million people watching online.
The whole project was created by the recently retired soccer star Gerard Piqué, who had a glittering career playing for Barcelona and the Spanish national team.
Piqué’s right-hand man, Oriol Querol, said that he and Piqué came up with the concept for the Kings and Queens leagues last year, because they felt that traditional soccer is missing out on younger audiences and needs to change.
“Watching traditional soccer is increasingly hard. It’s 90 minutes, very long, and not many things happen,” Querol said.
He gave an example: “Today, Barcelona played 0-0, no goals.”
In the Kings League, though, things happen constantly.
“Rules are borrowed from other sports, like water polo, handball or even video games,” said Querol, who is also the CEO of the Kings League.
To get the audience, Querol said, they enlisted some of the biggest online celebrities in the Spanish-speaking world, who became the team presidents.
One of the team presidents at the Queens League draft was 20-year-old Esperanza Borrás, or Espe, who said she had spent a tough week studying draft prospects to find the best picks for her team, the Aniquiladoras FC.
Like most team presidents, Borrás grew an online following by sharing videos on YouTube of herself playing video games in her bedroom.
Other team presidents are influencers, sports commentators or even former soccer stars, like Spain’s Iker Casillas or Argentina’s Sergio Agüero.
Whether from Spain or Latin America, there’s one thing they all have in common: millions of followers thirsty for content.
Presidents discuss the Kings League in talk shows, get in heated arguments and make anthems for their teams. They may even join an actual game and shoot a penalty kick.
For some, it’s hard to take it seriously, like Javier Tebas, the head of Spain’s soccer league, La Liga.
“The only thing the Kings League has in common with soccer is the ball and the goals,” he said, adding, “I like it as a circus, but you can’t compare it with the soccer industry.”
The Kings League doesn’t really see that as a problem, Querol said.
“It’s a thin line separating sports and entertainment, and we like to cross it.”
He said the Kings League wouldn’t work if it was all a show; the same if it was just soccer with different rules.