With the enormous popularity and expansion of the Spanish-speaking King’s League football phenomenon, the Italian community has answered with the GOA7 League. The league is similar to the Kings League regarding rules and gameplay; still, the inaugural Winter League reached a significant portion of the online Italian-speaking community which had yet been underutilised.
The GOA7 League was established in mid-2023, during the midst of the Kings League’s enormous popularity and millions of viewers. Originally, the league was founded with the hopes of a 12-team league in 2024; the recent Winter League featured only 10 teams, leaving the organisation room to expand. The recent Winter League came to a close on March 9, at the AC Leon Arena in Italy.
With the Kings League expanding to Latin America and planning a world cup, Germany exploring their Baller League, and now Italy’s GOA7 League, media and live-streaming-infused football leagues are taking over European audiences for sporting events on Twitch and similar platforms. Compared to Kings League and Baller League, how was the new Italian football league able to perform?
GOA7 League Winter viewership statistics
The inaugural league of the GOA7 brand spanned 6 months and was broadcast for over 120 hours. Previously, the league had held a shorter Summer Cup in June 2023, and the Winter football league was the organisation’s first attempt at a long-form league event.
All in all, the inaugural GOA7 league was a success, generating 2.4M Hours Watched and holding a consistent viewership of 19.7K Average Viewers. The average viewership for the Italian league is much smaller than the Kings League, which received over 500K AV for its 2023 Split 1 event for example, but the Italian-speaking demographic in online live-streaming is simply smaller.
The GOA7 league does not rival the Kings League or even Baller League directly, but it secures a large portion of the Italian-speaking Twitch audience and is one of the most viewed events of 2024 by Italian-speaking audiences. Just as the Baller League found its niche within the DACH community, the GOA7 league is finding its niche in the Italian one.
Naturally, the most popular language of the event’s broadcasts was Italian. The official GOA7League Twitch channel was the most-watched and most popular channel to cover the matches, outperforming the official YouTube Live broadcast by a considerable margin.
The 2023 Summer Cup event was much shorter than the half-a-year-long Winter league we saw finish up recently. Therefore, we will compare the viewership of this shorter cup to the playoff stage of the Winter League.
The Playoffs stage of the recently finished Winter split did mark a 22.1% increase in watch time, but the concurrent viewership fell by 7.7% compared to the Summer Cup. Although the Playoffs of the Winter Split were not able to beat the Summer Cup, the overall peak viewership of the Winter Split far outperformed the previous cup.
The Winter split received 40K Peak Viewers during the first Qualifier week of the event. Towards the end of 2023, hype and excitement were high for the new league, but this faded slightly as the league progressed. Viewership was nevertheless high, and many of the weeks of matches for the league found higher average viewership than achieved at the Summer Cup.
Ultimately, viewership for the recent Winter Split was stable compared to their first-ever event. The long Winter Split schedule enjoyed highs and lows, sometimes surpassing and sometimes falling behind the viewership for the Summer Cup. All in all, viewership did not see any significant changes throughout the Winter Split.
