OPINION: Pique's Kings League and the rapid video-gamification of professional sports

I remember once, as a kid, I was playing an EA Sports game with my older brother and our grandmother walked into the room looked at the TV from behind us and asked - what game are you watching?

What she didn’t realise is that it wasn’t a real game of sport on TV but just a video game. Partly, that was because she was in her late-70s and had no idea what a video game was but, mostly, that was because sports video games had become so realistic by the early-2000s that you could be forgiven for confusing them with the real thing: reality.

As sports video games have got closer and closer to the real thing, they have become an integral part of our leisure culture globally and have even morphed into sports themselves - E-sports.

We now watch people play E-sports like we (used to) watch people play real sports. What’s more, we actually pay to watch them play imitations of football or race-car driving and the best players of those games are making careers out of it just like real footballers and real race-car drivers.

One of the many enjoyable things about sports video games is that there aren’t as many rules as in reality so you can play with the product a bit. You can add features. You can make your own players. You can make yourself! And not just yourself but a better version of you - the one who plays for PSG with Neymar (31) and Lionel Messi (35).

You don’t even have to play normal football anymore. You can play FIFA Street football where you can dress Ronaldinho (42) up in whatever combination of Nike attire you like and then plonk him in a basketball court in central Amsterdam and make him do as many step-overs and rainbow flicks as your heart desires.

It’s just like reality except it’s a bit better. It’s the other reality where all your dreams come true, where your heroes are your mates and you win as many trophies together as you like and no one can take them away from you or your very own slightly stranger-than-real Ronaldinho.

The experimental mix of replication and elaboration in sports video games is undeniably fun and intoxicating for fans of the genre. However, as those games have gotten better and better, cooler and cooler, weirder and weirder - it’s led the consumer (us) to want more from the thing we were all trying so hard to replicate in the first place: real sports.

There is an apparent video-gamification of professional sports that has been intensifying for a while now. The process started with video-game-style graphics being superimposed over TV broadcasts and has stretched to gimmicky novel rules and even as far as allowing fans to influence and interact with the actual sports themselves.

WAIT, WHAT IS KINGS LEAGUE?

In case you missed it, Pique’s Kings League is a seven-a-side football tournament set up by the ex-Spanish international and popular Spanish streamer Ibai Llanos (27). There are 12 teams with each playing 11 matches before a playoff series. The league began on January 1st and the games take place every Sunday, being played back-to-back and streamed live on Twitch. The first match day attracted an average of 400,000 viewers per game, with the most-watched game attracting almost 800,000 sets of eyes.

There are all sorts of exotic rules in the league as well as cameo appearances. Sergio Aguero (34) and Iker Casillas (41) each run a team as do some influencers. The squads were built in a draft system and consist of members of the public who had to pass a trial, as well as former and current pros. There is even one mystery masked player called 'Enigma' whose true identity has been of some debate.

Before games, teams draw cards which allow them to perform acts during the match like doubling the value of the next goal or removing opposition players from the field. What’s more, fans can actually vote on the rules! It’s all very mad (or fun - depending on your taste) and is one of the most vivid examples yet of a true merger between real sports and E-sports.

The question is, is it a visionary union of mediums or is it more Frankenstein's monster lurching around the metaverse looking for a place to call home?

THE GAMIFICATION REVOLUTION

Examples of moves in this direction can be seen increasingly in other sports and an especially notable feature is the rise of fan interaction. The Carribean’s 6ixty cricket league (launched in 2022) is an interesting case. Aside from just generally ripping up the rule book and reinterpreting the game, in the 6ixty, it’s possible for fans to vote to decide the timing of a ‘mystery free hit’ - a random ball that a batter can’t get out to in each innings. 

In the burgeoning Formula E series - like F1 but with electric engines - organisers introduced a ‘fan-boost’ which allowed the public to vote for their favourite drivers with the winning five receiving a literal energy boost during the race. That rule has since been discontinued but other video-gamey features persist like power boosts gained for driving over certain areas of the track just like in the Mario Kart races of our collective youth.

The golf world is about to experience its own video-gamification revolution as well. TMRW Sports, Tiger Woods (47) and Rory McElroy (33) have all teamed up with the PGA Tour to produce the TGL (set to launch in 2024). The TGL will see a fusion of live golf and simulation golf played in a custom-built stadium and is a genuine cross-over between traditional and technological sports formats.

WHERE TO NEXT?

Like my now-deceased grandmother, we used to marvel at how life-like sports video games had become. That used to be the goal - to make games that looked and felt like the real thing to allow fans to leap inside the world of professional sports so they can pretend it’s them in those stadiums, scoring those goals, lifting those trophies. Now, as more and more video game features are seeping into real-life sports, it seems, it’s gradually becoming the inverse.

Real sports just aren’t enough for the TikTok generation - we now need real sports that look and feel like the souped-up, sugary, fake versions of real sports we have come to know, love and, perhaps, become addicted to. It is, as the well-worn expression goes, a case of life imitating art.

The bitter conservative in me mutters - it’s all becoming a bit of a circus. But, let’s be honest, sports and the circus have never been too far apart - they are both entertainment industries after all. And as long as the product is entertaining, people will come and pay their crypto-currency admissions and Pique’s proverbial pockets with bulge and bulge.

I’m not here to decry the emergence of these innovations, though. I’m not a Luddite intent on stalling the advancement of our kind or even the sports industry. What’s more, I know I’m also not the target market for these products because I’m already what young people might call ‘an irrelevant old man’ now and I’m only in my 30s.

I am scared, however. I am scared that we might lose the things we actually love about real sports as the imitations of them start to consume the magic they possess and spit it back at us in loud, multi-coloured madness. Like all balding men, I’m also terrified that I will be left behind - left behind in a dump heap of tragic ‘real’ sports fans as the world races on without us and towards distant and more brilliant online destinations.

So, let me end by saying this: please, Gerard Pique, if you are going to take my heroes, dress them up in silly outfits and make them do step-overs and rainbow flicks on Twitch until they drop, take me along for the ride with you into the weird mad-hatter matrix you’re creating. And not because I like your dumb league but because I don’t want to be the one left behind in an empty real-life football stadium, turning the lights off when it’s all over.