Here come the disruptors

Richards is a man of many hats these days, splitting his time and apparently boundless energy between Sky, the BBC and the American broadcaster CBS, as well as The Rest Is Football, Britain’s most popular football podcast.

He had been talking to Balotelli, though, in his newest role, as a representative of Deportrio, the team he and his podcast partners Alan Shearer and Gary Lineker have been operating for the last few months in the Baller League.

Quite what Richards’s job actually entails is a little fuzzy: he is Deportrio’s co-owner and co-manager, but mainly he sees himself as a “hype man”.

Deportrio are a team, but perhaps franchise might be better, or fledgling brand, or possibly also content house. And then there is the Baller League itself.

In the dictionary definition, AI overview sort of sense, it is a small-sided, short-form indoor football tournament that has just concluded its inaugural British season.

But it is also, depending on your perspective: the confluence of sport and influencer culture; “football for the attention-deficit era”, as the New Statesman put it; an attempt to pour lifegiving water on the game’s thirsty roots; the empty calories of a sugary energy drink. It may well be the future of football, whether that is good or bad.

Whatever it is, Balotelli wanted in. He texted Richards a couple of weeks ago to say that he would be around to play in the Baller League’s finals early in June. He gave him fair warning that he might not be able to play a full 30-minute game, but he would happily do a half.

But Richards wanted to win, and so he found himself letting his friend down. If Balotelli could not play a full game, then he would do without him. The Baller League, to a sceptic’s eye, might look like a circus, a novelty act. Richards is not alone in thinking it should be taken seriously.

Squinting in the London sunshine, the day after the Baller League had reached its crescendo, Felix Starck is feeling understandably chipper.

By most metrics, the first British season of the event he created has been a success. It has a broadcast deal with Sky. It has attracted a massive audience on Twitch and YouTube. The queues to get into the finals snaked around the O2 Arena in London. Starck has, somehow, forged a world in which Will Smith knows who Lee Trundle is.

His good mood falters only once. Starck is not overly keen on hearing his creation compared to the tournament that seems like its spiritual cousin. The Baller League and the Kings League, the short-form tournament launched in Spain, might both be seven-a-side football competitions. But that is where the parallel ends.

“I don’t like that comparison,” Starck said. The Kings League, he said, has leaned too heavily into “gimmicks”.

“They are building the WWE, scripted entertainment. We are building the UFC. One is not real. The other is actual fighting.”

At the risk of displeasing him, they are both part of the same broader trend, one that encompasses not just football but almost every established sport. The past few years have brought a rash of new formats, new tournaments, new iterations of intensely familiar games: cricket conjured The Hundred in 2021, the same year LIV Golf emerged; the Kings League came along in football in 2023.

This year has seen an even greater acceleration. As well as the Baller League, 2025 has brought World Sevens Football (in the women’s game), the three-on-three women’s basketball league Unrivaled, and Grand Slam Track, an athletics grand prix series promoted by Michael Johnson. The impression is that sport is in the midst of a great disruption, a sustained challenge to its decades-old established order.

They are not all of a piece; their origins, and their aims, tend to fit their contexts. Unrivaled, for example, is staged in the WNBA’s off-season; the tournament’s founders, the players Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier, told Boardroom that the WNBA’s commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, had helped guide them through the process of establishing a league.

World Sevens Football, too, saw part of its mission as helping women’s football “do things that the men’s game can’t,” as the league’s Head of Football, Adrian Jacob, said.

The Baller League – and the Kings League – have both, seemingly deliberately, chosen to lean into the role of outsiders. They have given more prominent roles to influencers, streamers and YouTubers; at their events, their star power often outweighs that of the former professionals playing alongside them.

Whatever routes they have taken, though, their central offer is the same. They are shorter, faster, bitesize versions of the games which gestated them.

To their critics that means they do not count as real. To their converts and their promoters, that is the appeal.

“We are living through the most boring era of football we have seen,” Starck said, bluntly.

“A lot of people say to us that we have prioritised entertainment over sport. But maybe it is just that our sport is actually entertaining.

“You see all sorts of people at our events: every age, every colour, every height, every weight. Whereas when I look at the crowd at a Premier League game, I see quite a lot of 55-year-old white guys.”

This is the obvious advantage that Baller League, and its peers and colleagues, have over the mainstream form of football: it is accessible.

Whether football is boring is, of course, subjective. Whether it is harder to watch is not. Tickets for these disruptor events are cheaper. It is possible to watch it all for free on YouTube.

That audience is not, as it might be at a Premier League game, in a state of high anxiety. It feels less existential, as though all your happiness rests on the outcome.

And that, to generations raised to believe that football – all sport – should look and feel a certain way makes these versions feel ersatz, inauthentic, meaningless, just as YouTube can to demographics not native to that platform.

But this is the central question that all of these events, from the Hundred to the Baller League, pose. They ask us, in effect, to consider what makes a sport real, what makes it matter, and whether it has to matter to be a sport. By treading that line between sport and entertainment, they help to define where it lies.

The issue of how to engage a younger audience is one that has vexed football, like all sports, for years. The answers Starck, Jacob and the others have hit upon may not appeal to everyone.

They might seem like just another manifestation of how ephemeral, how disposable every aspect of culture has been rendered in the chase for virality. But they also challenge us to think about whether spectator sport has stopped being fun.

1. Baller League

A six-a-side tournament that was originally founded in Germany before arriving in London this year. Teams are managed by celebrities including John Terry, Micah Richardsm Gary Lineker and Maya Jama, as well as internet personalities including ‘Angryginge’, while squads include former Premier League players such as Troy Deeney and Jordon Ibe, six-a-side specialists including Domingos Pires, and non-league talents. Matches are made up of two 15-minute halves with a variety of twists that aim to spice up the game towards the end of halves, such as long-range goals counting double or goalkeepers not being able to use their hands. The concept is focused on engaging younger audiences by being unpredictable and combining digital creators with recognisable football faces.

Jessy Parker Humphreys

2. The Hundred

Surpassing even Zak Crawley, The Hundred remains the most divisive entity in English cricket. The unique 100-ball format was such a success that new investors will probably enforce a shift to T20 at the end of the current television rights cycle in 2028.

The first edition launched in 2021 after a pandemic delay, confected as the next ECB cash cow, to attract new fans. Even if the initial financial modelling was shaky, it has largely achieved its aim, with an auction for the ECB’s 49% stake in every franchise raising more than £950 million to be reinvested across the counties and grassroots. Matches regularly sell out and the quality of players is improving. Long-term questions centre on the consequences of allowing such vast outside influence into the English game.

George Simms

3. Unrivaled

A 3x3 women’s basketball league founded by WNBA players Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart to provide more opportunities for women’s basketball in the US. Taking place during the WNBA off-season, the league has had a raft of celebrity investors including Ashton Kutcher, Megan Rapinoe, Coco Gauff and Steph Curry, and raised $35m in its first funding round. The WNBA is subject to strict salary restrictions which means players earn far more from their off-court activities. Paige Bueckers, this year’s No 1 draft pick, reportedly made more in her first year with Unrivaled than across four years of her WNBA contract.

Jessy Parker Humphreys

4. Esports

Twenty years ago, “competitive video gamer” was what you’d say to your mum when she asked what you wanted to be when you grew up. Now you can make a career out of it. Esports is redefining both sport and live entertainment: 45,000 people watched the final of the PES 2016 virtual tournament in France. That is, they packed a stadium as players looked at screens. Be cynical at your peril. Competitive esports requires planning, precision, quick reactions and mental agility. Next month’s World Cup in Saudi Arabia has a prize pot of $70 million, and the kingdom will host the first Olympic Esports Games in 2027.

Xavier Greenwood

5. LIV Golf

Perhaps the most disruptive new tournament ever, LIV Golf is Saudi Arabia’s attempt to buy an entire sport. A team format in which events are over only three rounds, rather than the traditional four, it has attracted some of the biggest names in the sport.

The PGA barred LIV defectors from playing their competitions, but they have continued playing major tournaments. Having been paid a signing bonus of around £221m, Jon Rahm has made an average of £1.7m prize money per event so far, despite only winning two tournaments, making him the second highest-paid athlete in the world.

What was a bloody war has recently reached something of a detente, largely due to LIV’s failure to attract viewers. Talk of reunification lingers via Donald Trump’s involvement and “constructive” talks.

George Simms

6. Grand Slam Track

Founded by four-time Olympic gold medallist Michael Johnson, Grand Slam Track aims to boost the profile of athletics outside of the Olympic cycle. Athletes choose to compete in two paired track events, collecting points for where they place across four different slams.

On offer is a huge prize purse worth $100,000 for the winner of each event category at each slam, with a Racer of the Year crowned at the culmination of the series.

However, the fourth and final Grand Slam Track event due to be held in Los Angeles at the end of the month was cancelled this week due to financial concerns. Viewing figures have failed to top 250,000 and stadiums have been half-full, perhaps as big-name US athletes such as Noah Lyles and Sha’Carri Richardson are not participating.

Jessy Parker Humphreys

7. Rugby X

A short-lived, fast-paced variation of rugby union, played with five players on each side in five-minute halves. Due to the shorter format, most of the players selected were from the sevens circuit.

Rugby X launched in 2019 at the O2 Arena in London, hoping to engage fans who had watched that year’s Rugby World Cup with a shorter version of rugby.

It was designed to attract younger audiences too, with a condensed, high-intensity version of the sport, which adapted the traditional laws to encourage more ball-in-play time, including not having lineouts or conversions. The law variations meant fewer collisions, as the emphasis was on the skill of players rather than their power, which might have attracted an audience put off by the number of collisions and injuries in traditional rugby.

Despite initial excitement and a successful launch event, Rugby X did not continue beyond its debut year.

Jessica Hayden