Chunkz, Pieface, and a YouTube-inspired sporting apocalypse

At this early point in the column, some readers may find themselves slightly lost. So here is your explainer, and it may be worth trying to get your head around it because this is about the future of sport.

The Allstars-Sidemen game was played at Charlton Athletic’s ground, The Valley. Charlton’s highest home crowd this season has been 17,046; Chunkz and co sold out the 27,000 capacity as fast as the online ticketing function allowed. Demand suggests they could have filled Wembley three times over - the same Wembley that England and Germany didn’t quite sell out, for their last game before the World Cup.

The teams at The Valley were both entirely filled with YouTubers, or influencers as they are known, or “creators”. Chunkz started off doing YouTube funnies with his cousin, Darkest Man. His following grew rapidly when he started a YouTube cooking series; he has since got a recording contract and has 3.2 million followers on Instagram.

The Sidemen are something else altogether. Jordan Schwarzenberger, their manager, describes them as “the biggest cultural export of this generation in the UK,” and he has the stats to back this up. “Only really One Direction have been at the level with the boys,” he says. What do they do? He describes them as “seven best friends who create entertainment”. On their YouTube channels, between them, they have more than 35 million subscribers. They had to recruit other YouTubers for the match. This is where the likes of Pieface and MrBeast came in. Kick-off was at 3pm but queues started forming for the Sidemen pop-up superstore at 10am.

What are they all coming for? What is the attraction? This is the bit where most of the population will pull a bemused frown but Gen Z will look at you as if you simply don’t understand the modern world.

Again, I’ll try to translate. There is a moment in the game when Speed, a fast-rising American YouTuber, pays tribute to Cristiano Ronaldo with a (terrible) step-over sequence that culminates in him losing the ball. Later, he scores but doesn’t know the off-side rule and in his highly theatrical disappointment at the goal being disallowed, he whips the referee (Mark Clattenburg) on the backside with the shirt he has removed to perform his highly theatrical celebration. Geddit?

The TV stats do not directly compare because England-Germany was on terrestrial versus the Sidemen game, which was streamed online. Yet the England match on Channel 4 averaged 3.7 million viewers and peaked at 6.1 million. The charity game on YouTube had 2.5 million live streams and has had 22 million total views so far.

Is it becoming more popular to watch the Sidemen playing football than the England team? What we can conclude is that for under-20s, it almost certainly is.

It is not just football. One of the seven Sidemen is KSI, a 29-year-old from Watford who started out doing commentary to the Fifa video game. Among numerous occupations, he also became a part-time boxer.

In 2019, when KSI fought Logan Paul, the American YouTuber, for the second time, at The Staples Center in Los Angeles, the bout sold two million pay-per-views which was estimated to place it in the top five highest-selling fights in history. Last year, Paul fought an exhibition eight rounds with the retired 44-year-old Floyd Mayweather Jr, which sold more than one million pay-per-views.

Only three days ago, it was announced that Mayweather, now 45, would have another exhibition bout against Deji Olatunji, who is KSI’s brother (but not a Sideman). In his career, Mayweather won every one of his 50 professional fights and is regarded as one of the greatest of all time. Normally, a boxer would have to climb the ranks and build a distinguished pro-fight CV to be considered worthy of sharing a ring with Mayweather. Olatunji has fought four YouTuber boxing bouts and lost three of them.

How and why is this happening. “Entertainment” is the answer. Professional sport has long had to consider how it packages itself as an entertainment form, trying to find the balance between integrity of the sport and its appeal as something punters would pay to view.

The latest revolution, at the fore of which we find the Sidemen, is sport where entertainment comes first and neither integrity nor quality is really the point.

The point could not have been any clearer at KSI-Paul II. Those two were headlining the promotion while, on the undercard, there were two world-title fights, one of which featured Billy Joe Saunders, the British boxer, defending his WBO super-middleweight belt. In other words, the pecking order had been rearranged so that the real old pros with a lifetime of boxing experience were second to the newcomers with an army of online followers.

If you are Mayweather, would you accept an exhibition bout against an authentic boxer, or one against an internet sensation who is going to sell a million views? That is an easy decision, but where is professional sport going if the Sidemen are suddenly rivalling the England football team and KSI is trumping Billy Joe Saunders?

How has traditional, professional sport responded? Because this is making a joke of it, right? Yet boxing promoters have blown with the wind and welcomed the YouTubers (and their millions of followers) despite the disgruntlement of those in the professional ranks. Brands have warmed to them too - why wouldn’t you? It’s the difference between holding your nose and getting an introduction straight into Gen Z.

Adidas, for instance, has supported the Sidemen. As a spokesman said: “We’ve got a longstanding approach of working with and championing social creators - whether that’s in sport, fashion, music, or an ever-shifting landscape of artistic expression.” Indeed, the establishment wants to learn from them. At the Leaders In Sport conference in London this week, Schwarzenberger was one of the keynote speakers. In the introduction to his session, the audience was told: “This is where it’s going. The influencers - whether you love them or hate them - they are here to stay.”

Indeed they are. What are the lessons? “That this is not so much about seeing incredible football, it’s about seeing their favourite people,” Schwarzenberger says. Gen Z wants personality and authenticity. Rather than having a team, just as often now they will support individuals within teams. They want stars who give of themselves and their personality, who won’t give party-line post-match interviews and don’t have an agent or a company working their TikTok, Twitter and Instagram accounts. So they like Jack Grealish, Lando Norris (who hangs out with the Sidemen), Erling Haaland and Mason Mount (especially when he hangs with Chunkz, who is his buddy).

Is this a threat to sport as we know it? Schwarzenberger says he can imagine a time when there is a Fifa World Cup and a parallel World Cup of Creators - which sounds like a threat. It also sounds like a sure sign of the apocalypse.

-The Times

Originally published as Chunkz, Pieface, and a YouTube-inspired sporting apocalypse