Manchester United playing Arsenal on Sunday should be the biggest match of the English football weekend.
But it isn’t.
Even though more than 75,000 supporters will head to Old Trafford to watch that Premier League fixture, the game with the highest attendance anywhere in Europe on Saturday or Sunday took place at Wembley Stadium in London between the Sidemen and YouTube Allstars.
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Liverpool, Arsenal and United are playing second-fiddle, crowd-wise, to sides that included KSI, Logan Paul, iShowSpeed, MrBeast, Kai Cenat, AngryGinge and Chunkz.
The Sidemen, a YouTube collective with 22 million subscribers, sold 90,000 tickets to watch them at England’s national stadium against a team of fellow YouTubers in aid of three charities: BBC’s Children in Need, Bright Side and M7 Education.
Their biggest charity match yet.
Entering the pitch in style @Sidemen 👏 pic.twitter.com/iy2RjlYeov
— Wembley Stadium (@wembleystadium) March 8, 2025
This was the sixth time the Sidemen have played an annual charity match in the United Kingdom, having previously appeared at Southampton’s St Mary’s Stadium, Charlton Athletic’s The Valley and West Ham United’s London Stadium. This game at Wembley, however, was by far their biggest.
Besides the tens of thousands who showed up in person, more than two million people streamed the charity match on YouTube.
The match was end-to-end carnage and full of moments that will no doubt go viral, whether that’s a yellow card being shredded on the pitch, or iShowSpeed scoring a penalty and doing his Cristiano Ronaldo-inspired goal celebration to the excitement of a sold-out Wembley.
The Athletic spent Saturday afternoon watching the spectacle…
So, who are the Sidemen?
They are a British YouTube collective formed in 2013 by KSI (Olajide Olatunji), Miniminter (Simon Minter), Zerkaa (Joshua Bradley), TBJZL (Tobit John ‘Tobi’ Brown), Behzinga (Ethan Payne), Vikkstar123 (Vikram Singh Barn) and W2S (Harry Lewis).
As a group and individually, they have amassed a global following of more than 100million subscribers on their individual YouTube channels, with their group page, the Sidemen, having over 22m. For context, Barcelona, the most followed football club on YouTube, have 21m subscribers. KSI alone has 25m.
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Having started out producing video content for YouTube, they now have an extended portfolio that includes a chain of fast-food restaurants called Sides, a best-selling book and a clothing line.
KSI is the most famous member of the Sidemen. He has appeared in several boxing matches against other YouTubers, including Logan Paul, with that fight in 2018 generating more than two million pay-per-view buys, and has a music career. Those two are also business partners in PRIME, a range of sports drinks sold in countries worldwide, including the United States and the United Kingdom.
How have they evolved and why are they so popular?
When tickets released for Saturday’s charity match were released in November, they took just three hours to sell out and more than 250,000 people were in a waiting room trying to buy them. By that metric, the game could have sold out Wembley three times.
When you consider that Munya Chawawa, one of the presenters on the YouTube stream, was not joking when he started the show by saying they were about to “break the record for the world’s biggest football match with the smallest amount of footballing talent”, it highlights just how big the event had become.
Though given the YouTubers they had signed up to play in the game, it is no surprise they managed to sell out Wembley. MrBeast, for example, has more than 370million subscribers to his channel and his own show on Amazon Prime.
In other words, these guys are extremely popular, especially with the younger generation which consumes content via YouTube as opposed to the traditional TV platforms.
Who else was playing?
MrBeast, Paul, KSI, iShowSpeed and Cenat were arguably the most high-profile names taking part. Earlier this week, Cenat appeared on ESPN’s First Take show alongside sports journalist and pundit Stephen A Smith, who recently agreed a $100million (£77.4m) contract with the U.S. broadcaster.
Other notable figures from the world of YouTube included Sketch, Chunkz, Deji and Danny Aarons. Jme, a British grime artist and record producer, was also playing.
Looks like they’ve been practicing 👀 pic.twitter.com/PStZkV8SxS
— Sidemen (@Sidemen) March 8, 2025
Mark Clattenburg, a former Premier League referee and the man in the middle at the 2016 Champions League final, officiated the match.
How many people were watching across the world?
A staggering amount.
Within five minutes of the stream going live at 2.10pm, the audience was just shy of 500,000. This number only grew as the match edged closer to kicking off at 3pm. It surpassed a million viewers before a ball had been kicked, with nearly 1.6million people tuning in to watch the start of the game.
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The production was slick and included three former England internationals — Jermain Defoe, Emile Heskey and Eni Aluko — working as pundits. There was a half-time show from KSI, performing his Thick Of It song, and AJ Tracey, a British rapper.
In total, more than two million people streamed the game on YouTube. In comparison, The Athletic has reported that well over four million watched the first leg of a Champions League play-off tie between Manchester City and Real Madrid on Amazon’s Prime Video last month.
How much money do they make?
Those taking part were not paid appearance fees, with the focus being on generating money for charity.
The Sidemen initially paid out of their pocket to put the game on, so that means hiring Wembley and then recouping their expenditure by partnering with various companies for the event, which this year included Visit Qatar and YouTube itself.
Putting such a match on costs well into seven figures, with a portion of the income generated from the partnerships also going to charity.
By the time the game was finished, £4.7million had been raised for the three charities, a new record for a Sideman match (last year’s raised around £2m).
What was the game like?
The players from both teams got together on Friday for some training, but if you tuned in expecting to watch a high-quality football match, then you would have been disappointed — but that was not the point of the event.
Within the first 10 minutes, players had fallen over themselves and Clattenburg had awarded two penalties — one for each team — with Joe Weller scoring for the Sidemen and YouTube Allstars’ MrBeast having his saved.
The game lacked quality, but it was frenetic and end-to-end. In the second half, Max Fosh, playing for the YouTube Allstars, was booked by Clattenburg, only for him to pull out a handheld shredder and destroy the yellow card.
Max Fosh just shredded the referee’s yellow card in the Sidemen Charity Match! pic.twitter.com/XtMGW4lnn4
— Dexerto (@Dexerto) March 8, 2025
The match ended in a 9-9 draw, with iShowSpeed scoring the decisive penalty in an ensuing shootout, watched by more than 2.5million people, which the YouTube Allstars won 5-4.
. @ishowspeedsui scores the winning penalty and the YouTube All-Stars are the champions of the Sidemen Charity Match🏆pic.twitter.com/UePUTQlW2L
— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) March 8, 2025
Will these games be taken outside the UK in the future?
As it stands, there are no plans in place for when their next charity match will be, let alone where it will be held.
The event organisers point to the level of planning that went into putting the fixture on, be it getting everyone’s schedules lined up or the capital risks involved with funding it. They take it on a case-by-case and year-by-year basis, meaning there are plenty of variables that go into whether it happens or not.
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The first question they would need to answer is whether they want to organise another charity match. If they do, the next question is where they play it. The prospect of going overseas is not being ruled out, but it is far too early to say whether there will be another game.
Though if there is, you would expect the personalities involved to be thinking about how to go one better than Wembley on Saturday.
What was said after the game?
“I did what I had to do out there as a captain,” iShowSpeed said after scoring the YouTube Allstars’ winner in the shootout. “The last penalty was up to me, and I won. In the game, I had ups and downs and I probably missed some goals, but our team won, and I got my first goal.
“Everyone is about to be happy. Come on YouTube Allstars! This is what (Cristiano) Ronaldo did, and I did it for him. I love my team, and I love my supporters. Speed game for life, let’s go.”
Cenat, who scored a second-half goal, was equally enthusiastic.
“I think everybody as a team came together and we used what we had at the most important moments,” Cenat said. “It was all about playing together and doing the right thing, and we brought it home. Amazing.”
(Top photos: KSI, left, and iShowSpeed; Getty Images)
