The many athletes who have shown a talent for chess as well as their own sport helped open the way, including Victor Wembanyama, Harry Kane and Momo Salah, and then came Erling Haaland’s million-dollar investment in the Chess World Championship Tour. Now the trend is spreading and becoming more established, drawing in other footballers too, among them one of the most visionary when it comes to diversifying his income, a process Gerard Piqué began while he was still playing. Forbes connected the dots in this article, explaining how chess has become “a full-blown cultural phenomenon, thanks to the growth it has experienced over the past decade. The Queen’s Gambit was a huge success, while streamers such as American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura and Sweden’s Anna Cramling have millions of followers on Twitch and YouTube.”
From there, it is easy to understand how and why Haaland and Piqué have invested in chess: the former Spain defender has acquired a stake in American Gambits, a franchise in the Global Chess League, which organises annual team tournaments. It is a highly attractive market, with a long history behind it, and one that is finally undergoing a profound transformation to bring it closer to younger generations. Christian Pulisic, too, has been involved in an initiative that seems to come from the future: Chess.com used him as the model for one of the bots that visitors to the site can play against.
Chess has become faster, and therefore less tedious than it was in the last century, while new formats have gradually emerged in which players have only a handful of seconds to build their strategies and make their moves. The result is a sport that can, in some way, also be sold on television and digital platforms. For now, the official FIDE (International Chess Federation) YouTube channel has 378,000 subscribers and has published more than 7,600 pieces of content. The most popular are the ones featuring fast games, with millions upon millions of views. And it is precisely in those numbers, in that enormous potential still waiting to explode, that footballers are beginning to invest.