Sidemen Charity Match 2023

The 2023 edition of the Sidemen's annual charity football match at London Stadium drew over 62,000 attendees and a peak YouTube Live audience of 2.8 million — including a viral IShowSpeed goal that trended globally.

Overview

On September 9, 2023, the Sidemen hosted their annual Charity Match at London Stadium. The event filled 62,007 seats (an attendance record for a creator-produced football match) and was broadcast live on YouTube to a peak concurrent audience of approximately 2.8 million viewers. Net proceeds of over £4.5M were distributed across multiple UK charities including Teenage Cancer Trust and Campaign Against Living Miserably.

IShowSpeed’s viral moment

Among the notable moments, IShowSpeed — a guest on the “YouTube Allstars” side — scored a goal that became one of the most-shared football clips of 2023 across TikTok and Instagram. The clip itself, decontextualized and shared in short-form, reached an order-of-magnitude larger audience than the live broadcast itself — a pattern characteristic of how the post-2022 streaming demographic discovers moments.

Series context

The Sidemen Charity Match has run annually since 2016 and scaled from a small community event into one of the largest creator-produced live events in the world, comparable in scope to Ibai’s La Velada (Spain) and Kai Cenat’s Mafiathons (US).