Five days ago, Adrián Contreras (Ibiza, 26 years old) scored at the Spotify Camp Nou in front of 92,522 spectators. An hour later and with two million viewers, El Barrio became the first team to win the Kings League by defeating Mexican streamer Juan Guarnizo’s Annihiladores 3-0. In the final of this competition, which brought together two million viewers live, the club presidents have the opportunity to take a penalty at the request of their coach: “I told Juan [Arroita] that I wanted to throw it away as soon as possible,” Contreras recalled in an interview with EL PAÍS conducted today in Madrid. No sooner said than done: minute 1 of the finale and this young content creator looks up at the sky and bites his lower lip in a nervous gesture. Moments like when his mother told him he couldn’t study journalism because they didn’t have enough money to pay for a room in Madrid may go through his mind. You may remember working at El Chiringuito (La Sexta, MEGA) for two years, where I went to bed “at 4 or 5 in the morning with only one day off a week”. Perhaps Adris’s sanity, as known to his millions of followers on the networks, brought him back to the cold of Butarque, the first of the stadiums in which he spent seasons recognized by digital media, where he usually does not charge his chronicles demanded. “I missed the three previous penalties and I don’t know why, I was confident that I would score.” The ball went into the right corner and could not be stopped by placement. “I felt an adrenaline rush, something filling my stomach, and I stayed still with my eyes closed; I didn’t even know what I was doing. When I opened it I saw all the players coming towards me with happy faces… and I thought it was worth it. We will win the Kings League,” says Contreras, who has 4.4 million followers between TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
After hugging his team, Contreras went to the sidelines for the next hug. His mother was waiting for him, with whom he commented on the tournament’s Final Four live and on Twitch. “These days I’ve wondered if she was the reason I had such a positive vision of the Games. I’m naturally pessimistic when my team plays, but I was happy with them there,” he says. In the middle of their youth, after the separation of their parents and an equally happy childhood in Ibiza, they went to Granada together. “We remembered those days together when I showed him the Selectividad ticket that allowed me to go to Complutense, but we didn’t even have the money to pay for a room in Madrid,” he explains. The solution came quickly with a move to his grandparents’ house in Toledo and a bus route, where he spent his first year of journalism, driving two hours there and two back. “I knew what I wanted to do. When someone asks me what I am, I continue to automatically reply that I’m a journalist, although it’s clear that content creation has long been my primary passion,” he says.
Adri Contreras, during the interview Jaime Villanueva
Despite the physical and mental exertion, Contreras received a grant and was unable to move into a shared apartment “in a cheap room in Madrid” without family effort. But I was already where I wanted, in the city where the media was, I could interview…” he explains. Countless unpaid collaborations began and the combination of the degree with each accreditation: “Bernabéu, Calderón, the Basketball Final Four in Madrid … everything suited me.” And all this ended in a “three-page” curriculum that caught the attention of journalist Josep Pedrerol. “Over there [en el programa El Chiringuito] They interview dozens of students every month, but I had photos of me in stadiums, snippets of interviews with journalists who work with him, articles, everything. They signed me straight away and I spent two very intense years learning a lot from him and his own standards.”
However, the Kings League winner’s story is a mark of his time and different from that of previous generations. Contreras explains it like this: “I sent Josep a WhatsApp [Pedrerol]. I told him I would give them a while but that I was leaving. YouTube had started to grab my attention and in fact I went to one channel, Football Talks. He understood, although one always thinks when one doesn’t screw up. Earning less than television, managing networks and editing, and taking advantage of the fact that he could then live in his father’s house and control his expenses, he chose to create content. The final twist in the script of a young sportswriter happened in March 2020: “The confinement came and I downloaded TikTok. I literally remember thinking nobody makes football content. I knew how important it would be to finish first, I learned that you had to publish a lot of content, and suddenly, in April, a video featuring the best players in history surpassed 100,000 views. I set a goal of posting 20 videos a day and the rest is history.”
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At the end of 2021, for the first time in Spain, TikTok held its No lo sabes todo sobre TikTok Awards and Adri Contreras won the award for best creator on this network in the sport category. The snowball was started, but the following obsession would eventually internationalize it: “In 2022, yeah or yeah, it went to Qatar. Half a year before the World Cup, I used all sorts of contacts and made it. Other creators who tried hard didn’t make it, and that made me realize that this would be a game changer.” When it comes to content creation, and TikTok in particular, the milestones can be quantified: In the month of competition, the most-followed sports journalist on the network recorded 800 million views. It’s a stratospheric number and, he explains, has nothing to do with his appointment as one of the presidents of Club El Barrio through Gerard Piqué. “I owe it all to him,” he says of the former Barcelona player. “I still remember the impression his follow on Twitter and his first message made on me.” They met for the first time on September 7 last year and Contreras couldn’t believe that they were meeting one from Kosmos sporting competition “that had all the ingredients for success. It was a dream, something made to measure for me,” he says. However, credit for winning the tournament goes to a much larger technical and athletic staff. “Winning the championship starts with the signing of Juan Arroita, whom I met exactly at Soccer Talks. He didn’t want to, he couldn’t see it, but I told him I didn’t know anyone who knew more about football. He had to be technical and athletic. And the other key figure was Joan Compte, the assistant coach and the one who knew all the players in Barcelona who could join the league. We started watching hours of videos, going through Excel spreadsheets and marking the top 10 players we wanted to sign for the draft. When I saw we made the top six, I knew we could perfectly win the Kings League.”
El Barrio had a discreet regular season and was also a tough team to beat in all games: “On the live chats, all the presidents said they didn’t even want to see us in color. That’s why I didn’t attach so much importance to reaching the playoffs,” explains Contreras. His team prevailed against the line-ups of the most experienced professionals of the beautiful game, such as Íker Casillas, Sergio Kun Agüero or Gerard Piqué. But also titans from the other mainstay of the live and online entertainment business such as Ibai Llanos, TheGrefg or DjMaRiio. “When I came back to the hotel after the game, I had a short circuit in my head. Everyone went to the party but I put the phone on do not disturb mode. During college I didn’t go out on Fridays to do a Europa League chronicle from home, so staying and not going out didn’t seem so strange to me.
Conteras runs a club whose sponsorship income is set to skyrocket ahead of the next edition of the Kings League. In addition to a coaching staff and their players, he directly leads two community managers, a photographer, a filmmaker, two video editors for TikTok, two video editors for YouTube and a graphic designer, agency and communications agency on the side. “After the final my head said ‘enough’. There was a party, but I kept sleeping and still it took me two days to recover physically. I still can’t believe what happened. In a very short time, I have experienced things that I could not even dream of,” he says today. He doesn’t have much time to rest, because in a few days he will present his testimony to gain the victory that is to come Queens League (female version of the tournament). He will do so as the president of the first club to win this update on football for the masses.
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