Why is everybody speaking to Ibai Llanos?

Outside, within the brilliant Parisian sunshine, the world’s information media lined up on the sting of the sphere on the Parc des Princes. Producers fiddled busily with cameras and increase microphones. Reporters chattered away, dutifully filling airtime earlier than their designated interview slots.
They have been beneath strict directions and constraints: three questions apiece, a couple of minutes, no extra, to mine the main points of the most important sports activities story of the summer season, to get to the guts of a switch that ended one period and ushered in one other. And then their time can be up, and Lionel Messi must transfer on.
Ibai Llanos’ setup was totally different. He had been ushered contained in the gamers’ tunnel, together with two of his oldest mates, Ander Cortés and Borja Nanclares. They had no sound tools. They have been filming on a cellphone. Yet Llanos had, at that time, an viewers of half one million folks watching him.
Llanos, 26, had, with out actually attempting or significantly which means to, usurped each information outlet on the planet. Messi’s first interview after leaving FC Barcelona for Paris St.-Germain wouldn’t be with a tv community or a serious newspaper. It would as a substitute exit completely on Llanos’ Twitch channel.
Ibai Llanos at his house studio in Barcelona, Sept. 12, 2021. The streamer counts Lionel Messi as an admirer and Gerard Piqué as a enterprise accomplice. His interviews is perhaps a glimpse into the way forward for sports activities media. (Samuel Aranda/The New York Times)
Over the previous couple of years, Llanos has interviewed a succession of soccer’s largest names, from Sergio Ramos to Paulo Dybala. He now counts some stars, like Sergio Agüero, as mates, and others, like Gerard Piqué, as enterprise companions.
Players who habitually mistrust the information media have been completely happy to spend as a lot as a few hours speaking to Llanos on Twitch, the Amazon-owned livestreaming service. That is popping him right into a breakout star of the web age in Spain and, at instances, sometimes invoking the wrath of journalists from extra conventional retailers who envy the entry he enjoys and disdain his lack of coaching.
Llanos requested Messi just one soccer query, on the attraction of enjoying alongside Neymar and Kylian Mbappé, and so there was just one soccer reply, delivered in that dampening monotone gamers undertake each time their sport is introduced up. Mostly, all the change was mild and cordial, its intimacy solely undercut by Llanos’ referring to the world’s greatest soccer participant as “Messi” — not Lionel, not Leo, not Señor Messi, however the phrase on the again of his jersey, someplace between an honorific and a schoolyard nickname — all through.
Ibai Llanos at his house studio in Barcelona, Sept. 12, 2021. The streamer counts Lionel Messi as an admirer and Gerard Piqué as a enterprise accomplice. His interviews is perhaps a glimpse into the way forward for sports activities media. (Samuel Aranda/The New York Times)
That was precisely what Llanos had promised. “I am not going to ask him about Mauricio Pochettino’s tactics,” he had defined on his livestream simply earlier than Messi arrived. Llanos shouldn’t be a journalist. He doesn’t faux to be a journalist. He shouldn’t be attempting to change into a journalist. And that’s what allowed him to get the unique each journalist wished.
Llanos has been a streamer since earlier than the time period existed. At age 15, he and a few mates from Bilbao, his hometown in Spain, arrange a YouTube channel, filming themselves enjoying the online game Call Of Duty. “It was growing, but it wasn’t so normal at the time to see gaming on YouTube,” Llanos stated.
They constructed a small however spectacular viewers — some movies attracted 20,000 viewers, he stated — and earned a little bit cash. “It was 30 euros a month, something like that,” he stated. “It wasn’t money to live on, just to buy a little bit of equipment. It was a hobby, a pastime. It wasn’t a business.”
He was nonetheless deciding “what to do with my life” when he observed an commercial for a casting name from the Liga de Videojuegos Profesional (LVP), Spain’s esports league, on the lookout for announcers. He and Cortés utilized and, in August 2014, bought the job.
The pay was initially “quite low,” Llanos stated, however he loved the startup power not solely of the corporate, but additionally the scene. “There was a lot of love,” he stated. As the league grew, so did his profile. “There were more and more events, collaborations with brands, athletes,” he stated. He moved to Barcelona. He did an advert for the discharge of the PlayStation 5.
But Llanos become a extra mainstream cultural phenomenon solely final yr. He had left the LVP simply earlier than the coronavirus pandemic — “there was a bit of a generational shift, and I felt saturated” — and devoted himself to creating content material for an esports workforce, G2 eSports, streamed on his personal Twitch channel. Cortés, Nanclares and a number of other different creators joined him.
Everything modified with the pandemic. As Spain went into lockdown, its inhabitants cloistered at house, Llanos noticed his viewership figures explode: His Twitch channel presently instructions 7.8 million followers, making him one of many 10 most adopted creators on the platform. His YouTube account attracts an analogous viewers.
After he introduced plans for a digital model of La Liga — filling the void left by the suspended league — it emerged that a lot of high-profile gamers already ranked amongst his followers, together with Sergio Reguilón, the Tottenham defender; Borja Iglesias, now of Real Betis; and Messi’s new teammate at PSG, Achraf Hakimi.
“There are a lot of players that play video games in their free time,” Llanos stated. “And because they could not go out, because in the first lockdown they did not have training or games, they had more time to dedicate to it.”
The most vital visitor, although, might have been Aymeric Laporte, the Manchester City and Spain defender. “Laporte was already following me,” Llanos stated. “We agreed to play Fortnite and stream it, and while we were playing he told me that he had messaged Sergio Agüero and invited him to play, and asked if it would be OK if he joined us. It was his first time on Twitch.”
Others have adopted. Earlier this yr, Llanos launched a weekly, longform interview phase on his channel: Charlando Tranquilamente, or Chatting Quietly. The likes of Dybala, the Juventus ahead, Ramos, the previous Real Madrid captain, and Agüero himself have all appeared as friends.
“They come because they like it,” he stated. “They don’t get paid. They come because they want to come.”
The gamers’ motivation is maybe a little bit extra calculating than that. “Twitch is the Generation Z platform,” stated Julian Aquilina, a broadcasting specialist on the media analysis agency Enders Analysis. “It skews very young, and quite male. It is quite a different audience to traditional broadcasters.” Llanos gives a valuable route into that viewers: His interview with Dybala, for instance, attracted greater than 100,000 dwell, largely teenage viewers.

That soccer’s largest stars discover it a extra interesting prospect than a extra formal interview, although, shouldn’t be doubtful. “Twitch has much more of a community vibe,” Aquilina stated. “It’s much more interactive.” To at the least one in all Llanos’ friends, the attract was that speaking to Llanos didn’t really feel like an interview in any respect. There was no digital camera, no sound tools, no call-and-response of questions, no outlined construction. The gamers really feel secure speaking to somebody who looks as if a good friend.
That, finally, has been the key to his success. He and Agüero have grown shut sufficient that the striker invited Llanos, surreptitiously, to Messi’s farewell dinner in Barcelona. The encounter earned Llanos his invitation to Paris, to Messi’s presentation, and to his world unique.
At the desk that night time, too, was one other participant now firmly in Llanos’ orbit: Gerard Piqué. The Barcelona defender was the primary visitor on his discuss present phase; he’s now, in impact, Llanos’ enterprise accomplice.
In August, the 2 males purchased an esports workforce. This was after Piqué’s funding car, Kosmos, purchased the Spanish streaming rights to this summer season’s Copa América, and broadcast it on Llanos’ Twitch channel. It did the identical for Messi’s first sport as a PSG participant final month.
It is an method, Aquilina stated, that will change into extra frequent. “Twitch is becoming a broadcaster,” he stated. “Amazon has done that with some NFL games, putting them on Twitch as well as Prime. If you have the rights to something, you want it distributed across platforms: You can sell the broadcast rights but still have an online presence.”
Llanos was not excited about that, he stated, that day in Paris. He was, as a substitute, concurrently coping with the nerves from “the most pressure I have ever felt,” and marveling a little bit at “being able to do this with two of my best friends.” The mixture was sufficient to present him that dizzying feeling of vertigo. He, and the revolution he represents, will not be going wherever, although. He will get used to the peak.