After turning conventional males’s soccer on its head along with his Kings League, ex-professional soccer participant Gerard Piqué now has his eyes set on reworking girls’s soccer utilizing the identical method: streamers, drama, and video game-like guidelines.
Piqué will debut his Queens League for girls’s soccer at the moment with six back-to-back video games on the league’s Cupra Area stadium in Barcelona. Like within the Kings League, most of the Queens League groups are led by a number of the largest feminine streamers and influencers in Spain and Latin America, reminiscent of Mexican streamer Rivers and Argentinian sports activities journalist Morena Beltrán. In distinction to conventional soccer video games, that are aired on paid TV, all Queens League video games might be free to look at on Saturdays on Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok.
Not all groups might be led by girls, although. 5 streamers from the Kings League, together with Saiyans FC president TheGrefg and El Barrio president Adri Contreras, will proceed to guide the feminine division of their groups within the Queens League. (All 12 groups within the Kings League now have a girls’s division and preserve their workforce names with slight adjustments).
“A very powerful factor about all of this for me is to benefit from the expertise and to indicate those that feminine soccer is on the identical stage as male soccer,” Twitch streamer Gemita and president of Porcinas FC, the workforce based by streaming big Ibai Llanos, instructed Gizmodo in February. “We’re going to do superb, and we’re going to have time.”
Queens League soccer, like its male counterpart, is predicated on indoor soccer and consists of two 20-minute halves. Nevertheless, Piqué shakes issues up by including his personal set of whacky guidelines. As an illustration, in minute 18 of the primary half, officers throw an enormous die on the sphere after which take away the identical variety of gamers from every workforce, forcing the remaining layers to duke it out with diminished capability. The Queens League additionally options a number of “Secret Weapon” playing cards that permit coaches to take a penalty kick or have targets depend for 2 factors as an alternative of 1.
So far as gamers go, the Queens League gamers have been chosen from a public draft open to any lady in Spain, no matter whether or not they had ever performed professionally. As a way to be thought of, candidates needed to ship a 30-second video displaying off their abilities to persuade Queens League officers to think about them for the competitors. On April 16, the streamer-presidents selected gamers for one of many 10 spots on their groups from a pool of 230 in a livestream on the Cupra Area.
Former and present professional gamers may also play within the Queens League. As an illustration, Melanie Serrano, a former defender who spent 18 years on FC Barcelona’s girls’s workforce, will be part of Porcinas FC within the workforce’s inaugural match towards Kunitas, the workforce of retired Argentinian striker Sergio “El Kun” Agüero.
Piqué’s new Twitch soccer competitors, which debuted in January, has been a shock success and gained a large following in a brief period of time. In truth, the title sponsor for the Queens League inaugural season is Oysho, a sports activities and leisure clothes model that’s half the Inditex empire, which owns Zara. Different notable sponsors embrace Visa and Gatorade.
In March, the Kings League crowned its first champion in FC Barcelona’s Camp Nou stadium earlier than 92,500 folks and attracted 2.16 million simultaneous viewers on-line. The Kings League may also return this weekend for its second season cut up on Sunday, someday after the Queens League debut, guaranteeing there may be pre-game, recreation day, and post-game content material from each competitions at the least 4 days every week till July. As well as, each Kings and Queens League video games might be proven on mainstream TV in Spain each weekend on Cuatro, which is a part of the Italian TV big Mediaset.
Sara Mérida, a former first division girls’s soccer participant who’s a part of Gemita’s Porcinas FC, instructed Gizmodo in February she believed the Queens League would permit girls’s soccer to take one massive step ahead.
“Ultimately, you’ll be able to get pleasure from soccer no matter gender,” Mérida stated. “I hope that after and for all, we will cease speaking about males’s soccer and ladies’s soccer, and easily discuss soccer.”
You’ll be able to watch the Queens League starting at 10 a.m. ET on the Kings League’s channel on Twitch. For the time being, the streams are solely broadcast in Spanish.
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