Sohn 2025现场：Gerard Piqué、Djamel Agaoua与Harley Miller

Thank you to the Sohn community for having us. As mentioned, I’m Harley Miller, the founder and CEO of Left Lane Capital. Here with Gerard and Djamel of Kings League, which is one of our core investments at Left Lane. Some shameless self-promotion here.

I’m sure everyone has been filled with exhilarating content around fixed income and interest rates and pontificating about the ways of the world. I’m certainly no macro pundit, so I’ll spare you my pedestrian view of that. But what I sure as hell am convinced of is that sports and the future of sports are going nowhere. If anything, they’re only picking up steam, as evidenced by what you’re seeing with media cycles of the Big Four and the emergence of these burgeoning new leagues across different sports, of which Kings League has been one of the pioneers over the last few years.

We at Left Lane are consumer, internet, and technology investors, and we try to invest behind permanent, multidecade, enduring secular trends—not things that are growing because of some change in administration or interest rates or otherwise. This is absolutely part and parcel of that. I wanted to kick off by asking: Could I actually get a show of hands? Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Kings League or are familiar with it.

Okay, some people here have. They’re not yet in the U.S.; we’ll talk about the expansion plans. I think it’s worth taking a moment to level-set and introduce yourselves. Hopefully, you don’t need much of an introduction, but Kings League surely deserves it. Help the audience understand the genesis of Kings League—how it was birthed, how it came into existence, and the opportunity set you saw—and we can go from there.

1. Kings League Reinvents Football

Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Gerard Piqué. I played football for 20 years—the real football. I played for Barça for most of my career, for FC Barcelona. I was born in Barcelona, so it was my entire childhood supporting the team. It was a dream when I joined, and I played 16 years for Barça.

I was very lucky to win absolutely everything because we had a generation of incredible players. At the latest stage of my career, I realized that I was watching less football on TV, although I kept playing. Everyone knows football here: It’s 90 minutes, and the rules are very old. Sometimes the game finishes 0-0, which is strange because you buy a ticket, spend a lot of money, and spend 90 minutes watching a game where the best thing is to score a goal—but you don’t score any goals, no one wins, and you go home.

In a way, I thought, “Why don’t we change this a bit?” We use the rules of football, the most followed sport in the world, but we change it in a way that makes it more like a video game and more entertaining. We changed it to a 7-versus-7 format, much quicker and much more dynamic, with some crazy rules. For example, during the last 2 minutes, if you score a goal, it counts double.

During some phases of the game, it’s 2 versus 2 or 3 versus 3, so people really go wild when they’re watching the game. A lot of goals happen, and a lot of things happen. At the same time, we wanted to introduce this entire digital world with the streamers. The figure of the streamers is very important in our ecosystem because, a few years ago, I started working with Ibai, who is the biggest streamer in the Spanish and Latin American communities. He’s huge in terms of audience and viewership, and every day he creates live content with his audience.

The audience can text him live and ask him about anything—if he’s sad, if he’s happy, if he’s going to the toilet, absolutely everything. This creates a level of loyalty and engagement that’s huge, much bigger than what I can have with my fans, or an artist, actor, or any kind of celebrity. This is very important because we thought that if we gave ownership to these streamers, who have huge communities that are very loyal to everything they do, any project they launch—a club, a franchise, a football club—all of these communities would jump to follow whatever the club does.

If we put 12 teams together, with 12 different streamers and all those communities together, all of a sudden we would start with a big audience. This is what we did. We started on January 1, 2023.

And you retired when?

I retired in November 2022. I had this idea in the summer of 2022, and we started working on it. It was just before the FIFA World Cup in Qatar that I decided to retire and focus on starting this venture, this project. The league officially started on January 1, 2023.

The success was incredible. We had much bigger audiences than La Liga, for example, which is like a religion in Spain. Every Sunday, we had hundreds of thousands of people connected and watching every game. We used Twitch, YouTube, and all these digital platforms through the channels of the streamers, who have huge viewership.

After a couple of months, we realized that the success was so big that we decided to organize the final of that league at Camp Nou in front of 92,000 people. We sold out that event. This was in March 2023—something that was totally unthinkable at that time. It was a pretty crazy event for something that had just started 3 months earlier.

Then we decided, because of the success, to launch the Queens League with the same teams as Kings League. We believe that women’s football in Spain is very powerful. FC Barcelona has won the last 2 or 3 Champions Leagues in a row and has had the Ballon d’Or winner, Aitana Bonmatí, for the last 2 years. We believed it was very important to launch Queens League.

We held the second final in July at the Atlético stadium in front of 60,000 people. We sold out that final again—the finals of Queens League and Kings League. After that, we decided to expand. We had 40% of our audience coming from Latin America, Central America, and South America, so we decided to go there and create Kings League Americas.

It was basically the same format: 12 teams from streamers and legends of the game in Central America and South America, with teams from Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, and so on. We started in February 2024. For the first final, we sold out Estadio Azteca, where Maradona did the Hand of God in the 1986 World Cup. Eighty thousand people sold out the stadium. It was pretty crazy.

2. Kings League Goes Global

Then we realized that starting leagues was very difficult because obviously you have to find the streamers, the venue, and a lot of other things. In order to reach the entire world and really have an impact in different countries at the same time, we decided to create the first World Cup of Clubs. It’s very similar to the Champions League for people who are familiar with European football: the best teams from Spain, the best teams from the league in Mexico, plus different wild cards that we gave to an Italian streamer, a French streamer, a Japanese streamer, a Saudi streamer, and so on.

We created the first international event with 32 teams over 2 weeks in Mexico, with the final at a Monterrey stadium. Fifty-five thousand people attended, and we sold out again. We set all the records possible. After that, the World Cup helped us understand which countries had the most appetite to create a league.

At 3:00 a.m. in the morning, because of the time zone and the fact that the World Cup was happening in Mexico, we were setting records in Italy, France, and different countries. So we decided to expand into those countries. In the last 3 months, we launched in France, Italy, Germany, and Brazil.

We did a round last year, around April, I think, of about $60 million from Left Lane, from Philip, which is a Mexican fund, and other strategic partners, including Jake Paul and his fund, likely David Blitzer, LionTree, and others. Thanks to all this investment, we were able to expand. At that time, I started contacting Djamel to hire him to become the CEO of our company, and he has helped us a lot over the last 9 or 10 months to expand and have our product in these different countries.

Let me ask quickly: Djamel, you were at the NBA. You’re a very tenured entrepreneur. You’ve started and sold multiple companies, and you were a senior executive at the NBA. You had been building a relationship with Gerard. Why would you leave a very cushy job to join a startup league?

Good afternoon, everyone. I didn’t win the Champions League, unfortunately, but I probably won a tournament when I was a kid in a village somewhere. I have a background as a tech entrepreneur. I’ve created and sold several companies in the tech world, based in Silicon Valley and in Europe as well.

3. Sports Faces A Disruption

After that, I was so passionate about sports that I saw a trend happening: A lot of sports IP, including the biggest ones, are facing a possible disruption of their model. They see some sort of threat down the line, which is the fact that the media—the main media—have an issue with younger audiences. They have a problem capturing those audiences, which could create a problem down the line.

I was approached by several sports IPs to bring my tech background to different sports IPs. The first one was rugby, actually, and the next one was the NBA. I’ve been a big fan of the NBA forever. Then I joined the NBA as managing director for Europe and the Middle East.

And that's where I defined the NBA Europe project that has been presented recently. But Gerard came with a project that was so exciting and also a fast-paced, hypergrowth project that was very exciting to me. So, yes, I did something that could look a little bit weird, let's say, to leave this very noble house and very admirable company, which is the NBA, that I really respect and admire a lot, for this adventure. This adventure is fantastic because we are going so fast and we have a real opportunity to build something completely different from what the other sports IPs are doing. We're targeting those young audiences, building a product that is exactly designed for them, respecting all the characteristics that define young audiences, trying to fix a problem, which is basically to capture those young eyeballs and bring them back to a traditional sport, which is football. That's what's very exciting.

Very cool. What's next for Kings League? What's the ultimate vision, or where do we go from here?

4. America Becomes The Next Frontier

Well, we're in 6 leagues, 6 territories right now, 8 leagues, 6 in 6 territories, because we have Queens League in Spain and Mexico. The short-term plan is to launch the league in MENA, the Middle East and North Africa territory, based in Saudi Arabia. We will announce this in the next couple of weeks.

Then the idea is to come to the US after the second Kings World Cup Clubs, which we will do in Paris from June 1st to June 14th. The idea is to launch in October and come here to launch the US League. First of all, we will do a showcase event, hopefully here in Brooklyn, at Barclays Center, and then the idea is to start the league in February 2026. The best teams of the US League will qualify for the next World Cup of Clubs, happening in June 2026. In order to do that, this is why we're here these days, sitting down with different people who can help us really launch the project here.

Yeah, we'll come back to that in a moment. When we were evaluating Kings League early last year, before we closed the investment, a couple of things stood out. I think a lot of investors perceive sports to be sort of an endless money pit, a never-profitable venture. You have to incur a very rigorous J-curve—a J-curve being just burning money for a long time to get to quite big scale before you can turn a profit. Making a return in sports was incumbent upon the next billionaire or sovereign wealth inheriting your unprofitable asset as sort of a trophy asset.

One of the things we admired and appreciated early on about Kings League was how you controlled the pyramid. I remember you told me you really studied the economics of the UFC and WWE, and how those were properties that have been able to command, for many, many years, a 50%–60%+ EBITDA margin, which is incredible for a business that has physical operations. A lot of this is because they control the pyramid, right? In the traditional football or soccer world, there's FIFA, all the different leagues from the Premier League to the Bundesliga to La Liga, and there are players' unions too. There's just a lot of red tape and bureaucracy.

One of the things that I think we really appreciated about how you were architecting Kings League was that you really controlled the whole pyramid. You were FIFA down to the players' union and everything in between, and you weren't at the behest of media-rights partners, right? You really spoke directly to your audience, and you had huge distribution from day 1 in terms of eyeballs that led to big sponsorship dollars.

I think the audience here would appreciate, Djamel, if you could share a rough sense of the scale of the business for this upcoming financial year. It's also worth noting that the company hasn't really historically burned money. You were profitable in the first 2 years of operations. I'm sure we'll think about burning money as you expand to 8 to 10 to 12 territories at the same time, but the fundamentals of the business have been extremely sound from day 1.

Yeah, we've built a model whose objective is really to capture this young audience. Capturing this young audience means that we need to bring the product to their eyes using their tools, their devices, and their platforms. We also use their influencers, the people they like to follow. That means the product must be distributed on social platforms, on live platforms, on all of them, and has to be distributed through the people they trust, their favorite influencers. That's why this league has been built this way.

Every team is associated with, or even owned up to 100% by, digital influencers or legends of the game. Those digital influencers have the role to market the product, explain the product, explain the rules, distribute it, commentate it, and create this interactivity, which is so important for young audiences. The young generation is very different from ours. They are used to interacting with their content.

They are used to even having discussions with these influencers. They need to be involved, and that means we need to use those guys to bring our product to the level of interaction that is needed. When you make this hypothesis, you say, “Okay, it's free-to-air everywhere; you maximize the reach.” We push on all platforms. We have plenty of media deals that are low-value media deals for now because we don't want to have any exclusivity. We don't want to be behind a paywall. We want to distribute the product as widely as possible.

By producing such a big volume of impressions, we have a big value for our partners. Our sponsors and partners trust in us and put money into this IP because, specifically, we are able to first of all create a massive reach. But on top of the massive reach, Kings League, after 2 years, is number 2 in the world among all league sports in the world in terms of level of engagement. The first one is the NFL, and the second one is Kings League, far before all the other big and respected names that you can imagine. This interaction with the ambassadors of the game, who are mainly our streamers, brings the interaction that creates this engagement. This engagement, being organically spread out massively, is how we're able to monetize.

If you look at what we've done, we're operating in our third year now. We have doubled our revenue twice, from the first year to the second year and from the second year to the third year. Our accounts as well follow this path. We are now 260 people at Kings League, and all our leagues are losing money for the first split, meaning the first season, the first 6 months, and now break even as soon as the second half-year of activity, actually.

Yeah, the business—we'll keep it a bit confidential—but it has a surprising scale, which is atypical for a typically emerging sports league. Last 2 things, because we're running short on time. What do you think, Gerard? Traditional sports—are they taking notice of Kings League? Are they paying attention? What can they learn from Kings League and your approach?

Well, I think that we are pretty complementary in this case with traditional football. These new generations consume totally differently. They are able to watch traditional TV—Barça playing Real Madrid—and then, on the iPhone or iPad, watch a Kings League game, Ultimate Móstoles versus Porcinos FC, and they can follow both games at the same time. I think, thanks to Kings League, we can help all these leagues to really have this young generation again. We have 85% of our audience that is less than 35 years old.

The TGL, for those who are golf fans, were lauding their younger audience of viewers at an average age of 58, compared to 61 for the NBA. So we're talking about having 90% of our viewers below the age of 35.

Yeah. So when we think about multi-decade-long relationships, this is evidence of that. We have different partnerships with Serie A, for example, and different clubs like Juventus or Olympique de Marseille, where we do a lot of content with them. We make our players train together with their players or create content, and the same with the leagues. I think they are understanding that, at the end of the day, we can help each other.

Kings League is a tool to bring this young audience again to consume football. Although, obviously, traditional football will forever, I think, be the most-followed sport in the world—even though in the US it is not—I think Kings League has arrived to help these leagues and organizations that have 100 years of history, at the same time that they obviously can help us a lot also with these partnerships.

5. The US Franchise Opportunity

Last thing, as I know we're at time: Kings League, as you talked about, will launch in the US. You're here this week taking meetings with potential investors, as the approach for the US League—which has not been the case, perhaps, for the other territories—will be to sell franchises and give partial equity ownership in the US entity, right? That's a little bit more of the traditional sports approach to it.

I think for the audience here, the theme, as I've gathered from Sohn, has been, “What's the investment opportunity? How do you read the tea leaves?” So how do you think about pursuing sports and the future of sports? Again, I think there's a very private-equity approach to it, which is inheriting something that's already very large and mature, but there's probably not going to be a lot of alpha in that.

The other play is their access to potential franchise teams in burgeoning leagues like Kings League. I’m sure you all will be spending more time in New York and in different cities across North America over the coming months as you embark on that journey with a bit more intention.

But I just wanted to thank the audience here today. Hopefully, this was a slightly more refreshing fireside chat, and it’s been a pleasure to work with the two of you here. I think Kings League is the next massive public company property here that has a really infinite runway ahead of it. More to come. Thank you. Thank you very much.