Football is under threat from new formats like never before

Telegraph

21-05-2025

On Wednesday, some of the most storied football clubs – including Manchester United, Manchester City, Bayern Munich, Paris St-Germain and Roma – will take to the field at the Estádio António Coimbra da Mota in Estoril, a picturesque town near Lisbon. Several regulars for England women, including Ella Toone, Grace Clinton and Jess Park, will all feature; so will Brazilian star Kerolin.
But the game that they will be playing is not 90 minutes long. Instead, the teams will play 30-minute matches with seven players a-side, on a field half the size of an 11-a-side pitch. The eight teams are playing in the inaugural World Sevens Football tournament. More than the $2.5 million (£1.9 million) prize money for the champions, the sides are playing to test an idea.
Can football successfully imitate the short formats in other sports, and have its very own version of rugby sevens or Twenty20 cricket?
'The idea as a whole has been born out of looking at other sports,' says Adrian Jacob, head of football at World Sevens. 'You think how you can make things more relevant, maybe, and more exciting.'
Other new football competitions have the same aim. The Kings League, a seven-a-side league established by Barcelona great Gerard Piqué, has attracted 90,000 fans to the Nou Camp. The Baller League, an indoor six-a-side football competition originally created in Germany last year, is shown live every week on Sky Sports. There are myriad similar competitions, including the Infinity League run by broadcasters DAZN.
Of course, short-format football is nothing new. In playgrounds and parks, truncated versions of football are as old as the game itself. Masters Football, an indoor six-a-side competition featuring retired players aged over 35 from leading clubs in the UK, was shown on Sky Sports from 2000-11 and was revived in 2022.
But never has there been a wave of major short-format leagues to rival the number in 2025. These different tournaments are all essentially making the same bet: that changes in how we watch football, driven by new technology, have created a new demand for a snappier version of the game.
Attention spans shortening
Jacob has a simple answer for why the World Sevens tournament is launching this week.
'We have this generation who want to see things happen very quickly and are scrolling the whole time,' he says. 'I have two daughters who are 10 and 13 – they aren't sitting through a 90-minute game.'
The average attention span of a human is now 8.25 seconds – less than a goldfish. While the rest of society adapts to reduced attention spans, the world's most popular cultural product is not immune.
'The media landscape and media consumption habits have changed dramatically in the last 10, 20 years,' says Djamel Agaoua, the chief executive of the Kings League. Yet in the same period, football has 'not fundamentally changed.'
Short-format football leagues are the 'outcome of the changes in society, technology and business,' says Simon Chadwick, a Professor of Afro-Eurasian Sport at Emlyon Business School, Shanghai. 'Indian Premier League cricket has shown how lucrative disruption to established modes of consumption can be – hence we are now seeing similar types of development.'
Shorter formats are not just condensed versions of the game. With fewer players a-side, they also lend themselves to producing far more goals.
Ninety-minute football is a low-scoring sport: there have been 2.9 goals per game this Premier League campaign. Shorter formats feel about halfway between traditional football and basketball with its relentless scoring. The excitement around goals is a little tempered. There will probably be another one to celebrate in a few minutes, after all.
Those behind short-format leagues believe, essentially, that fans value the goals above subtlety and stylistic contrasts between sides.
'We have that generation where they want things very quick, very sudden, a lot of action, a lot of excitement,' Jacob says. 'The shorter formats give that – more goals, more skills. And, to be honest, probably less tactics, and more gung-ho.'
Pique's radical seven-a-side King's League
In 2022, Piqué – one of the greatest players in Barcelona's history, and a World Cup winner – went out for lunch. He was mobbed, which was itself unsurprising. But the young fans who asked for selfies were less interested in Piqué than the man he was dining with: Ibai Llanos, the biggest streamer on Twitch, the livestreaming service, in Spain.
'They wanted to take a selfie with me but their interaction with Ibai was on another level – far beyond what we, as athletes or musicians, can achieve with our fans,' Piqué later recalled. 'They knew what he ate earlier that day, what he said, it was unbelievable.
To Piqué, the moment crystallised influencers' power to captivate a new generation. This led him to launch the seven-a-side Kings League in Spain in 2023, which by most metrics is the world's leading short-format league.
Matches of two 20-minute halves are played by amateurs, who receive a modest match fee; celebrities and influencers are often 'presidents', a role that can include managing the team during games. Lamine Yamal, Sergio Agüero and Neymar, who can often be seen cajoling his players from the sidelines in Kings League games in Brazil, are among the team owners.
'We are merging the 'creator economy' with football, the most popular sport on the planet,' says Agaoua. 'It's an incredibly powerful combination.
'Today's young audiences – we call them the 'swipe-up generation' – are accustomed to content that is relentlessly entertaining, delivering relentless emotional payoffs. If it doesn't grab their attention as they're swiping or scrolling, it's not working.'
All of this is done with the spectacle in mind; those watching on their phones are as important as those at the ground. 'This is a product that was born and lives on digital media,' Agaoua says. The Kings League has over 28 million followers across social media accounts; 80 per cent of its fans are younger than 34.
Baller League is 'a new era' for game
Every Monday evening at Copper Box Arena in east London, around 5,000 fans crowd in to watch the Baller League, an indoor six-a-side competition. At the same time, tens of thousands tune in to watch Sky Sports. Far more important than those who watch live, though, are the numbers who watch clips on social media.
'A new era of football,' the Baller League proclaims in a slogan on the side of the pitch. Each evening includes six matches, featuring all 12 teams in the league.
Games are 15 minutes each half, but with twists. No corner kicks are awarded – but if a team records three corner kicks, then a penalty is awarded. Goals scored from the back two-thirds of the pitch count double, allowing a side to go from behind to ahead in one kick. For the last three minutes each side is only allowed one player on the pitch – who is not allowed to enter the opponents' half and cannot use their hands even when in goal.
Josh Harrop coming in clutch! 💥 pic.twitter.com/p5LGTjNlcS
— Sky Sports Football (@SkyFootball) May 5, 2025
Such gimmicks are common in new leagues: the focus is squarely on entertainment, not sporting integrity. Similarly, in the Kings League, teams start each game with two players, gradually reaching seven. Each team picks a card at random from a deck that can be played during the game to give them a particular advantage. One card, for example, makes every goal the team scores count double for four minutes.
Where World Sevens Football is rooted in mainstream clubs and players, just playing a new form of the game, competitions like the Baller League are very different. Celebrity is at the core of the league.
Managers include both high-profile football figures, including Gary Lineker, Ian Wright, John Terry and Luís Figo, and those whose credentials are in other pursuits. The rapper Dave and social media figures with the ear of Gen Z, including AngryGinge, Miniminter and Sharky, are among the managers. The teams themselves – including N5 FC, 26ers and VZN FC – bear no resemblance to sides in the 90-minute game.
The players themselves in the Baller League are a motley crew: a ragtag mix of former professionals, including ex-Liverpool player Jordan Ibe and former Arsenal player Henri Lansbury, former academy players, semi-professionals and futsal players. Each player receives £400 per game: excellent money for a few hours' work, yet nothing like enough to entice megastars.
Curiously, some of the best publicity that the Baller League has received involved untoward scenes: ex-Watford striker Troy Deeney got a red card on his debut for shoving an opponent, who then jumped into his back. You suspect the organisers did not mind. The incident brought a whiff of authenticity to the new league, just as Australia's Big Bash T20 league seemed rather pleased about an on-pitch altercation involving Shane Warne in the competition's early years.
Troy Deeney's got the F.C RTW players riled up 😳 pic.twitter.com/9KsIc6DGGM
— Baller League (@BallerLeagueUK) April 21, 2025
Still, for spectators themselves, the stakes are low. Fans largely go to enjoy trickery and goals and take photos of, or selfies with, stars from football and beyond. The essence of sport – who wins and loses – is incidental.
'The players will want to win, because that's their natural way of doing things,' Jacob reflects. 'If they don't win, you know what? They're going to have fun anyway. And I think the fans are going to have fun, and it's not going to be 'oh my God, we've lost'.
'Are our fans going to be as heartbroken if they get knocked out in the group stages compared to if they lose the Champions League final? No.'
World Sevens Football wants to transform women's game
The site of the inaugural World Sevens Football tournament is revealing. The competition will take place only 30km away from the Women's Champions League final, and finish one day before. Organisers hope that fans in Portugal for the Champions League will have their interests piqued by a very different form of the game.
'We thought that this was a good time to do it,' Jacob says. 'We're hoping to further shine the spotlight on women's football. When better to do that?'
Jacob argues that 'We're not in competition with 11-a-side football'. But, with structures less entrenched than in the men's game, he believes that there is particular scope for new formats to thrive in women's football.
'The clubs on the women's side are much more eager to try new things and to grow the game in different ways than on the men's side,' he says. 'What we should be doing in women's football is looking at men's football and not copying that – but look at what they can't do and do it.'
The attempts to get many of the continent's biggest clubs to compete in the competition show how World Sevens aims to work with the 90-minute game. There is also overlap between investors: Jennifer Mackesy, a co-founder of World Sevens, is part of Todd Boehly's Chelsea ownership group.
While short-format men's leagues are powered by celebrities, Jacob argues that women's leagues can have more sporting merit. 'We felt that we had this opportunity whereby, actually it could be club-based and player-based – and that the players who are already stars could be stars.'
But not all clubs approached signed-up to the first season. Man City are also notably far from full strength, suggesting uncertainty about how much to back the new venture.
Agaoua is careful not to position the Kings League as a threat to the traditional game. 'I have no doubt that football, in its current 11-a-side format, will remain the world's number one sport,' he says. 'We believe there is also room for another compelling format of football to live alongside it and engage big audiences.
'Young people still love football and idolise football stars. But there's no doubt it's getting harder and harder to get them to watch a 90-minute live game.'
Investors believe that short-format football is much more than a fad. Last year, Kings League raised £50 million to fund international expansion. Kings League now has leagues in six countries and significant broadcasting deals.
The ultimate aim, Agaoua explains, is to have '30-40 leagues around the world and a brand that is loved and valued by fans, and synonymous with entertainment and innovation.'
While mainstream football will be challenged by formats designed with modern consumption in mind, perhaps the greatest threat that these leagues pose is not to the 90-minute game. Instead, it could be to completely different sports.
Here, perhaps, is a potential irony of short-format football. A concept borrowed from other sports, who have had far more need to experiment, could now endanger the health of these games as well as traditional football.