Gerard Piqué

Gerard Piqué understood before anyone else in elite football that a locker room is not a sanctuary but an unscripted set.

In 2017, he founded Kosmos and put his capital where the traditional industry saw only predictable press conferences. His goal was always control of the audiovisual narrative. While his teammates invested in real estate or wineries, he built a production company able to bypass the middlemen of sports media.

Nobody saw the blow coming.

The Documentary That Blew Up Sports Journalism

In June 2018, Spanish television viewers were caught off guard by an unusual broadcast. Kosmos Studios produced The Decision, a thirty-minute documentary short in which Antoine Griezmann agonized over whether to sign with FC Barcelona, only to announce that he would stay at Atlético Madrid.

The impact was felt as much in the Camp Nou offices as in mainstream newsrooms because an active player had produced an exclusive on a direct rival without asking permission from his board.

The following year, he doubled down with Matchday: Inside FC Barcelona (2019), an eight-episode documentary series for Rakuten TV with English narration by John Malkovich. The cameras went into the locker rooms after the debacle at Anfield against Liverpool. It departed from the club's official hagiography. It showed stunned faces and funereal silences with high-budget advertising aesthetics.

The Bastard Format of Split Screens

At the end of 2022, he announced his definitive retirement from the playing field with a meticulously crafted audiovisual piece. No crowded press conferences or institutional statements. Three minutes of cinematic editing were enough to close fourteen seasons in the first team and rack up more than twenty million views in a few hours.

The very next day, he already had another business up and running.

In November 2022, he launched the Kings League together with Ibai Llanos. The format blended the aesthetics of a video game with seven-a-side football, cards with secret penalties, and the chaotic production style of Twitch. And the response far exceeded any initial audience forecast when it drew ninety-two thousand fans to Camp Nou in March 2023 to watch an amateur final streamed for free online.

In 2024, he took the competition to Mexico under the Kings League Américas brand and sold broadcast rights to linear channels that had once looked down on streaming. So traditional networks ended up paying to broadcast a product designed specifically to destroy them.

Cold Numbers After the Show

Not all of Kosmos's ventures avoided the accounting wall. In January 2023, the International Tennis Federation unilaterally terminated the contract signed in 2018 to manage the Davis Cup for twenty-five years, after failing to reach an agreement on reducing the annual fee set at forty million euros.

The dispute ended at the Court of Arbitration for Sport and exposed the limits of financial audacity when facing century-old federations.

Piqué doesn't apologize for charging admission.

In 2018, he acquired FC Andorra when the club was competing in regional football and took on a debt of three hundred thousand euros before bringing it into Spanish professional football. But the most controversial move came with the brokering of the move of the Spanish Supercopa to Saudi territory in 2020. That contract, signed with the Royal Spanish Football Federation, secured twenty-four million euros in commissions for Kosmos, spread across six editions. The case led to criminal proceedings before Court of First Instance and Investigation Number Four of Majadahonda over possible business corruption offenses.