Taking place in Saudi Arabia on January 19 was perhaps the most popular friendly match in history. We are talking about the match of PSG versus the Riyadh team, which featured the star players of Al-Nassr and Al-Hilal: quite possibly it was in this match that we saw the last confrontation between two world football legends - Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. The game attracted a lot of fans both at the King Fahd Stadium in Riyadh and on streaming platforms.
Just before the start of the friendly match, Messi and Ronaldo shook hands, and then the action started: already in the third minute, Lionel scored the first goal. After half an hour of the game, Cristiano was hit in the eye by the PSG goalkeeper, but, despite the injury, he managed to score a penalty and equalize the score.
At the end of the first half, Juan Bernat received a red card and PSG was left with ten members until the very end of the match. However, this did not prevent the team from winning with a final score of 5:4.
Viewership statistics
PSG's friendly match against Riyadh Season was streamed on multiple channels of various livestreaming platforms and attracted over 1.9M Peak Viewers. In total, the broadcasts of the game generated more than 3.2M Hours Watched and attracted 974.7K Average Viewers. It should be noted that YouTube was the most popular platform for match coverage: its viewers generated more than 95% of the match’s total Hours Watched.
PSG's official English-language YouTube channel was the most popular, gathering just under 1.4M Peak Viewers. The Twitch channel of this football club closed the top 5 with a result of 43.7K Peak Viewers. Note that the broadcast of the match on Twitch was available only to subscribers of the channel.
Ranked second is the Arabic YouTuber Hamdy Ashour, who attracted more than 482K Peak Viewers. Curiously, this was the first full broadcast on his channel. Previously, the creator only launched the premieres of his videos.
Closing the top 3 was SPIDER GAMES channel which mainly hosts game broadcasts followed by only a few dozen people. Curiously, the stream of the PSG - Riyadh Season match on this channel attracted the attention of 275.5K Peak Viewers.
Ranked fourth with a score of 59.7K Peak Viewers was IShowSpeed, a popular American YouTuber and an ardent fan of Cristiano. It should be reminded that he became one of the best breakout streamers of 2022.
Football is very popular on streaming platforms, especially recently amid the hype surrounding the recent World Cup. Recall that during the World Cup, the Brazilian creator casimito broke the YouTube Live record for Peak Viewers, gathering more than 6.1M viewers on the broadcast of the Brazil-Croatia match.
At the same time, smaller football tournaments consistently attract hundreds of thousands of viewers. For example, especially popular in January are the Flórida Tour Vasco 2023 and the Kings League, in which show business stars and football legends take part.