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. 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.
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 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.
The match ended in a 9-9 draw, with iShowSpeed scoring the decisive penalty in an ensuing shootout, watched by more than 2.5 million people, which the YouTube Allstars won 5-4.
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.
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.
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