Surveys on the habits of young people show that it is difficult for them to spend 90 minutes watching a football game without doing anything else. On this idea, Gerard Piqué put his Kosmos team to work to invent a tournament based on soccer, which was the closest thing to a video game, with the participation of well-known streamers to spread it. The apotheosis of this competition, the final four of the Kings League, was held on Sunday in a packed Camp Nou.
The Quarter beat the Annihilators, which was surely irrelevant. What is significant about this final is that people were distracted by a show that lasted eight hours, in which many things happened. Like the arrival of Piqué and the presidents of the finalist clubs by helicopter, the performances of rappers, colorful dances or fireworks. Like a domestic Super Bowl.
On Sunday, the FC Barcelona stadium suddenly rejuvenated, as the average age of the spectators plummeted. And Piqué managed to get on the front pages of the press and have minutes on television news with his new toy. But if the video killed the radio star, this league won't take football away. A relevant fact: the most chanted was the name of Messi so that he returns to Barça, not so that he plays football 7.
The King League is fun, but it has no emotion. The feeling for some colors is not improvised. Another thing is that everything in our time is instantaneous and we cannot spend much time on anything without looking at our mobile. And the young generations do not enjoy a game, a landscape or a book without repeatedly going to their smartphone. The ideal would be to change habits, but we prefer to adapt to this new anxiety.
In this life and in this intense (and bewildering) time that we have to go through, there is room for the Kings League and for football. The only thing that is evident is that the celebrations of this new competition should go on the entertainment pages and not on the sports pages. In the Kings League people have a good time, in football you experience passion. Di Stéfano said it: Scoring a goal is like making love.
