Ibai Llanos

Ibai Llanos didn't learn to commentate in a journalism school or under the tutelage of radio sports legends. His school was a modest room in Bilbao and a 13-euro microphone in front of endless League of Legends matches.

In August 2014, he and his friend Ander Cortés passed a casting for the Liga de Videojuegos Profesional. He earned just over a hundred euros per broadcast while spending entire nights calling plays at a breakneck pace that was more reminiscent of classic boxing or horse racing than the electronic broadcasts of the era.

He had a rapid-fire delivery and a sense of timing that worked without big-budget visual support.

The Commentator Who Blew Up the Broadcbooth Standard

For five years he was Spain's leading voice in esports. But the format of a technical commentator felt too narrow for someone who used everyday humor to keep thousands of people watching other people's matches for six hours straight.

In early 2020, he signed with the club G2 Esports to focus exclusively on creating audiovisual content. The move coincided with the months of home lockdown, when Twitch saw its users multiply and the creator from Bilbao turned his room into the most-watched Spanish-speaking set.

He interviewed top athletes from his computer screen without going through corporate press offices. He managed to get Lionel Messi live on air on the day of their presentation in Paris in August 2021, a broadcast from a personal account that completely caught traditional TV networks off guard.

Nobody saw such a massive audience coming.

That same year he founded his own competitive team, KOI, together with former footballer Gerard Piqué. Both understood that digital entertainment called for the technical packaging of the mass spectacles of the twentieth century.

The Event Machine and the Leap to the Stadium

His real breakthrough into large-scale production came when he decided to move his broadcasts off the computer and into sports venues. In 2021, he organized the first edition of La Velada del Año, an amateur boxing night between digital creators broadcast live.

The project grew at a dizzying pace. It went from a closed studio to filling the Badalona arena in 2022 and Madrid's Metropolitano Stadium in 2023, combining international music acts with amateur fights.

In July 2024, the event drew more than eighty thousand people to the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium and drew 3.85 million simultaneous viewers online, breaking the all-time platform record on Twitch at that point.

Behind that broadcast was no amateur setup, but a full television production with more than forty cameras and mobile units adapted for online streaming.

Alongside this, he founded the Kings League in November 2022, a format that transformed seven-a-side football with video game mechanics designed to hold an audience used to the fragmentation of the mobile phone.

The Numbers Behind the Curtain

The workload of Ibai Llanos's personal project demands a technical and corporate infrastructure that has little in common with the simplicity of his first live streams. Its parent company, which holds the business contracts and image rights, coordinates dozens of directors, sound engineers and production staff in Barcelona.

But gigantism brings unavoidable financial pressures. Maintaining competitive infrastructure in esports such as KOI generated documented multimillion-dollar losses between 2022 and 2023, forcing shareholder restructuring and alliances with entities such as MAD Lions and Movistar to balance the books.

And the pressure of live television never forgives.

On the film side, he lent his voice in 2021 to the Spanish dub of the movie Space Jam: A New Legacy. Critics at the time pointed out the shortcomings of putting an internet broadcaster behind a dramatic voice-over booth, a clear example of the gap between natural live-stream charisma and the discipline of studio filmmaking.

In 2024, he closed the fiscal year of his parent company with advertising revenue of over eight million euros and a permanent staff of thirty employees.