Welcome to the future of football, where the ability to entertain is king

The Guardian

01-04-2025

The first ever goal in the UK version of the Baller League is scored by the influencer PK Humble, just in case you ever find yourself taking part in a pub quiz in 2045. Humble – a midfielder for Hashtag United and star of the recent YouTube series Inside – takes the ball out of defence, advances it at a frankly embarrassingly leaden pace and side-foots it past a goalkeeper who should really do better.
Welcome to the future of football. It's faster, better and more exciting than the real thing. Albeit not faster in a strictly physical sense, or better in a strictly technical sense, or more exciting in the sense that you actually need to care about who wins. But it is, nonetheless, all of these things. Why? Because we said so. And don't just take our word for it. Maya Jama says so too. Slow, lingering camera shot of Maya Jama. Now, what was the question again?
Look, I'm going to take a wild swing here: you're probably not the target audience for Baller League. I'm basing this entirely on the fact that you're reading the legacy liberal media in 2025. You probably don't even care that a new influencer-driven football league was launched in London last week with celebrity managers and a player roster including Henri Lansbury, Marvin Sordell, Adrian Mariappa and Jordon Ibe. You probably have recycling to sort or something.
Nevertheless, something important is happening here, even if you have to peer between the lines a little to see it. The Baller League – taking place over 11 consecutive Mondays at the Copper Box Arena in London – is a spiritual cousin of the Kings League, the Gerard Piqué-backed vehicle that launched in Spain in 2023. In May a new seven-a-side women's football tournament, World Sevens Football (W7F), will begin in Estoril with a prize fund of $5m (£3.9m). Together, these constitute perhaps the most concerted effort yet to challenge the traditional model of football: 11-a-side, playing outdoors on grass, affiliated to a club, tied to a locality. For 150 years, this is the vision of football that has prevailed, from Sunday League to World Cup final. But what if, in fact, this is not the only way of playing football?
Instinctively, we already know this. Whether in the playground or the park, all of us grew up playing football in its loosest form: small sides, small pitches, dribbling and shooting, football as a vehicle for individual expression. Wembley singles. Three and in. The rabona that would be described in hushed tones long after the final score had been forgotten. Baller League is, in effect, an attempt to capture and monetise this essence. Teams comprise six players and matches consist of two 15-minute halves. At certain intervals random new rules will be introduced, such as goalkeepers not being allowed to use their hands. 'Slow games are dead games,' says Baller League's chief executive, Felix Starck, who sees the league as football's equivalent of the Ultimate Fighting Championship: an explosion of crossover content under one roof, where the ability to entertain and tell a story vastly outweighs anything you can do with a ball at your feet.
Starck is stark on the ways traditional football has failed its audience. Interminable VAR delays. The triumph of sanitised possession football that discourages teams from taking risks on the ball. A hidebound fixation on teams and communities at the expense of heroes and personalities, which is increasingly how young people want to consume the game. 'People don't give a shit where they're born,' Starck insisted in a recent appearance on the Business of Sport podcast. 'They're following heroes. We are hero-driven.'
The real question, of course, is how you define a hero. And one of the most notable elements of the first season of Baller League is how little of the star talent is actually on the pitch. The real celebrities – Gary Lineker, John Terry, Luís Figo, Mark Goldbridge, KSI, Angryginge – are either in the dugout or behind the scenes. Jama, the presenter and DJ, has been appointed the coach of MVPs United. Was there a recruitment process? Was there a PowerPoint presentation? I bet she doesn't even have the Uefa Pro Licence.
This is, in effect, an entirely new kind of footballing economy, run not on pure sporting merit but on the infinitely transferable skills of branding and projection. Set aside the format gimmicks for a second, and the common theme of these new tournaments is the idea that team sport is basically a vehicle for individual expression, a platform for viral moments, a way to build your personal brand. If you're a League One player with a mean stepover but who doesn't really fancy training or tracking back, which vision of the sport makes more sense to you?
And of course underlying all this is a far bleaker assumption: that you are on your own out there. There is no structure, no safety net, no common responsibility one to another. All you have at this unsettling juncture in history is yourself, your talent, your brand, your content. You possess no intrinsic value beyond the worth you can provide to the content platforms and tech giants of the world. The match fee for Baller League players is about £400 a game. But the spectacle itself has already been carved up and divvied out.
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Naturally, for those of a certain demographic, the instinct here is to deride, to disdain, to ignore. But of course the Baller League and W7F and the Kings League are a genuine solution to a problem football has ignored for too long. What happens when a sport prices out its core audience through spiralling ticket prices and ruinous broadcast subscriptions? What happens when a sport gets lost in its own self-importance?
What happens when a sport builds its foundations on a broadcasting rights model that largely ignores the fact that everyone has a mobile phone? Why does it have to be 11 on a team? Why does it have to be 90 minutes? Why does the pitch have to be the size of a small park? You may not love the answers. But in their brazen interference, the new disruptors of football are at least asking a lot of the right questions.
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