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Every summer, the Spanish Twitch streamer Ibai Llanos hosts a livestreamed boxing tournament called La Velada del Año (The Evening of the Year). In just four years, it has gone from a relatively small event featuring matches between a few influencers from Spain to an enormous global phenomenon featuring over 20 combatants and a host of musical performers. A record-breaking 5.9 million Twitch users tuned in to see this year’s event, held July 13 at a packed 80,000-seat stadium in Madrid.
The biggest name on the bill was Will Smith, who appeared as a headlining musical act and led the crowd in the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air TV show theme. The Oscar winner was the first English-speaking performer in the event’s history, but he wasn’t the most popular part of the evening. According to data from StreamsCharts, the most-viewed moment during the stream, which also set a record with 3.8 million simultaneous viewers, was a boxing match between two influencers, one from Spain and one from Chile.
The event makes for a perfect cross-section of what internet popularity looks like in 2024. For a start, there’s the boxing matches. Mano-a-mano combat has been a promotional tactic for influencers for years. Examples appear across the spectrum, from controversial YouTuber turned MMA fighter Logan Paul all the way to tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who made serious preparations for a cage match last year before Zuckerberg called it off. In an era when cultural cachet is defined by parasocial stan armies, who live up to their name by getting into fierce, bitter rivalries with other fans, there’s an indelible power to seeing these famous figures literally trade blows.
Of course, in reality, these influencers and internet personalities understand it’s not really a competition. Ibai regularly collaborates with other streamers from across the globe, combining their audiences and fan bases for more engagement and a higher profile. The same day as La Velada del Año, YouTuber MrBeast uploaded a video entitled “50 YouTubers Fight For $1,000,000.” The video is done in MrBeast’s usual frenetic style, but the format itself seems clearly inspired by Ibai Llanos’ tournament. Ibai himself is one of the 50 YouTubers who appears in the video, forestalling any accusations from fans of either streamer.
The competition being conceived for Twitch broadcast also means it’s modeled after an esports tournament as much as a UFC fight. Ibai, who serves as the MC and commentator for the evening’s matches, first achieved success on Twitch as a Spanish-language League of Legends announcer. He has parlayed his streaming success into a media empire, including a televised talk show and cofounding the Kings League, a soccer league that optimizes the game for streaming by adding video-game-inspired rules like power-ups. Video games are already a huge industry, but they’re starting to become popular for marketers, suggesting events like La Velada del Año, which bring the culture of gaming into more traditional spaces, will only become more common on Twitch and off.
Twitch itself is in an odd, paradoxical position. The streaming platform has seen an overall decline in user and revenue growth for the past few years and has never turned a profit since being acquired by Amazon in 2015. In February, the site completely withdrew from Korea, which had been one of its biggest foreign markets. At the same time, though, Twitch streamers are bigger than ever as the general audience for livestreams grows. Spain in particular has become an enormous market for Twitch streamers, since they can stream to a global Spanish-speaking audience while taking advantage of lucrative European marketing deals.
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Even as Twitch’s future remains uncertain amid layoffs and attempts to compete with TikTok, the platform’s biggest stars are landing guest appearances from luminaries like LeBron James and Kevin Hart, putting Will Smith in good company. Smith has a clear understanding of how to capitalize on viral popularity, as he has demonstrated in recent months by emulating AI-generated memes and posting video-game-inspired choreography from his films to TikTok.
Smith obviously understands this is the direction culture is going. He isn’t using La Velada Del Año as a way to promote his first new song in years or his latest film, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, as much as he’s using it to maintain his status as an A-list celebrity for a whole new audience who may have never heard of his music or acting. A Twitch stream of a boxing match in Spain isn’t quite at the highest echelon of global culture, but that may only be a matter of time, since it has broken engagement records for the last three years in a row.
As celebrities find themselves needing to do more to reach fans online, it’s not hard to imagine a world where an increasing number of them have to be ready to box.
