Kings League has gone from a viral experiment to a €200M media and sports property — and Piqué is just getting started.
Gerard Piqué won eight La Liga titles, three Champions Leagues, and a World Cup. Then he retired from football at 35 and built something that might matter more. Kings League — the 7-a-side format he co-founded in 2022 with streamer Ibai Llanos — has become one of the fastest-growing sports properties in Europe, blending live sport, streaming culture, and creator audiences in a format that legacy institutions cannot replicate.
The league closed a €40M sponsorship cycle in Q1 2026, with anchor partners including Puma, Spotify, and Neon. Broadcast rights have been sold in 14 territories. The Kings World Cup in March 2026 drew 92,000 live attendees in Barcelona's Estadi Olímpic and 8.3M concurrent viewers on Twitch — the platform's largest single sports event since Ninja's retirement stream. Kosmos Holding, Piqué's investment vehicle, now manages €200M+ across football IP, Davis Cup media rights, and four European tech bets.
Piqué is expanding Kings League into Italy, Germany, and Mexico in H2 2026 — each market structured as a joint venture with a local media partner. A women's league, Queens League, is already in its second season. The pitch to investors: sport built natively for streaming, not retrofitted for it.
Read the original essay — Forbes →“Traditional football told fans to sit down and watch. We told them to become part of the product. That's not a gimmick — that's the only model that scales for the next generation.”
— Gerard Piqué, Founder, Kings League / Kosmos Holding