Sidemen Charity Match 2022

About

Sidemen Charity Match 2022 refers to the soccer, or football, match that took place between the KSI led U.K.-based content creation team "The Sidemen" and friends against the YouTube All-stars team, featuring various YouTubers and content creators such as iShowSpeed. The event was the fourth charity match done and featured multiple high-profile creators from the U.K. and U.S., including MrBeast, Georgenotfound, Karl Jacobs, Noah Beck and the U.K.-based content group Beta Squad, which resulted in the event raising over $1.14 million USD for charity.

Background

The charity match is an annual event held by The Sidemen that had to be postponed due to COVID in previous years. This time in 2022, the teams were able to compete with various content creators from different social media sites, bending the strictness of the team names, in favor of having a wider variety of participants and viewers which meant that TikTok stars and Twitch streamers were allowed to join.

The purpose of the match was to be entertaining to the sold-out stadium of over 22,000 people, while also raising money that would be split amongst four different charities: Teenage Cancer Trust, CALM, Rays of Sunshine and M7 Education. The roster for each team, which was announced one at a time via Twitter and was posted^[1] prior to the match-up, included a balance of rookie and experienced footballers (shown below).

Online Reactions

While each content creator brought their own fanbase into the lead-up surrounding the event in September 2022, certain streamers were prominently featured among early discussions about the match, such as IShowSpeed. In preparation for the match, knowing that he was going to be announced as taking part in it, Speed released a music video^[2] for a remix song called "Ronaldo" after Cristian Ronaldo in which Speed says that Ronaldo is the greatest soccer player, adding his iconic "Siuuuu" multiple times. This music video would go on to gain over 19 million views in three months, as well as turn Speed into a crowd favorite creator to be taking place in the match, with many eyes poised to watch him (shown below).

This hype was amplified with KSI, no stranger to directly calling out other creators such as Logan Paul, making it known that he intended to dog Speed the entire match, tweeting that he would make Speed have a terrible day on the pitch, which reached a boiling point when pre-match the two met in the locker room and seemingly went at each other in a video^[3] that was viewed over 1.2 million times in two days (shown below).

Match Day September 24th, 2022

The match started off very fast with a moment many said was coming — Speed confronting KSI. In the first 20 seconds of the game, when KSI first touched the ball, Speed ran down the field and quickly slide tackled him, leading to a celebration that was caught by the camera crew and became the first viral moment^[4] of the match (examples shown below).

The Sidemen team was able to claim victory in a rousing match that was full of goals, ending 7-8, with the final goal being scored within the last four minutes of regulation. Compilations of the goals started to flood social media shortly after,^[5] where people began to discuss which goal was their favorite from the match (examples shown below).

All sidemen charity match goals #sidemenCharityMatch pic.twitter.com/gBjnOQ4xoX

— Ali Sufyan (@AliSufyan1717) September 24, 2022

Not included in the goals compilation is a goal that was scored by Speed, who was obviously off-sides at the time, and thus didn't have the goal count. This moment became the second prominent meme moment for the streamer, who did not appear to understand the concept of off-sides the entire match, and celebrated for an entire minute and a half before being alerted that his goal did not count, much to the chagrin of the commentators and attendees^[6] (shown below).

Speed offside goal 😭 pic.twitter.com/SsTXJS5OJo

— IShowSpeed Updates⚡️ (@SpeedUpdates1) September 24, 2022

Various Reactions

Search Interest

External References