Gerard Piqué built a soccer league for the Twitch generation, and three years later he has cut 50% of his team, closed his leagues in France and Germany with no return date at the moment, and paralyzed the Spanish competition for six months. and the internet numbers and engagement on the internet they were not badbut that wasn’t the problem. The problem is that real football has other places where it reigns without rival.
What has happened? Kings League workers published yesterday a statement in which they dismantled the version that the company had leaked to the press two days before starting the ERE negotiations. The company had spoken of a 30% cut in the workforce and the real figure, according to those affected themselves, is 41 layoffs out of 83 workers: almost 50%. At the same time, the French and German leagues are paralyzed with no expected return date, and the Spanish league stops its activity for six months to, in the words of the organization, “prepare the product for the future.”
Kings League CEO Djamel Agaoua, incorporated in 2025, admits in the corporate statement that “money has been burned.” The simultaneous expansion to Brazil, Germany, Italy and the MENA region, managed from the offices in Spain, was economically unaffordable.
Story of an ambition. The Kings League started on January 1, 2023 with digital audience figures that scared LaLiga. The first day reached an average of 300,000 people watching the matches between the league channel and the streamers on Twitch. They achieved a peak of 800,000 viewers only on the league’s main channel, data similar to the average of all LaLiga matches the previous season. Comparisons were published everywhere: it seemed that Piqué had found the crack in traditional football.
Streamer world. Streamers like Ibai Llanos, TheGrefg or Guarnizo were presidents of the teams, and that turned each game into an extension of the entertainment that their communities already consumed. The format had gamified rules, random penalties, special cards. It was soccer 7, but designed for those who have been playing ‘FIFA’ for ten years.
The numbers trick. However, Twitch’s numbers don’t exactly measure sustained following. In 2024 the drop compared to the first figures was evident: the decrease was 54% compared to the first months of the competition, with an average of 192,000 spectators at the beginning of that season. That year’s final reached only 258,000 people on average with a peak of 425,000. In the first months of 2023, the same competition had accumulated more than two million viewers at its maximum peak, adding the official channel plus those of each streamer-president.
By then, the Kings League had bought into its own narrative, and oversupply compounded the problem. The first split, the second split, the Queens League, the Prince Cup, the Kings Cup, the Queen’s Cup and the Kingdom Cup suffocated the product, and each new tournament diluted attention rather than focused it.
One round. In February 2026, with audiences already declining, the Kings League closed an investment round for 53 million euros. The round was led by the American fund Alignment Growth, with the stated objective of expanding the competition globally, with the United States as a goal. With this operation, the Kings League accumulated more than 160 million dollars in total financing since its launch. Four months later the ERE has arrived, and the workers are pointing in that direction: the company has just raised 63 million euros and the savings that justifies dismissing almost half of the workforce is just over two million.
A martyrdom The workers’ statement also describes the work culture that prevailed in the company: three years of seven-day weeks, averages of ten hours a day, and overtime systematically above the legal limit of 80 hours per year established by the Workers’ Statute, in most cases without financial compensation or rest. On June 8, the CEO congratulated the entire team on the success of the Queens League final and two days later, the ERE was in the media.
Had he left? The question, then, is whether the Kings League has ever had the possibility of competing with football. We have a precedent in American football: in 2001, Vince McMahon and NBC they launched the XFL with the aim of becoming the entertaining alternative to the NFL, with fewer penalties and a format with elements of reality show. The first broadcast achieved 54 million viewers, but by the following week the audience had fallen by 50%, with a continuous decline until the closure after a single season. Apparently, viewers were not interested in a hybrid between sport and wrestling spectacle.
Unbeatable football. Spanish football has fans in third regional teams that fill stands with 800 people every weekend. This link does not arise from the product being entertaining, but rather from the fact that it is part of the local identity and, in many cases, family or territorial traditions. A child who grows up watching Rayo Vallecano or Villarreal with his father does not give the same identification value to a streamer. Even though he has a million followers. Football accumulates emotional capital for decades and the Kings League had to build it from scratch.
And now? There are some pending issues: the Kings World Cup Clubs in Italy will be held in July 2026, and we will try to move forward with those who are still in the company. Piqué, in turn, publicly tested after the Queens League final the possibility of compressing the entire competition into a format of a few days. That is, a possible solution is to lower the ambition. Maybe it would have been a good exit idea.
In Xataka | The Kings League has debuted on traditional television. It has had less audience than a La 2 documentary
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