Last weekend, we had the absolute honour of producing Sidemen’s sell-out charity football match at Wembley Stadium. Attracting over 2.5 million live streams and 17 million+ on catch up, it raised over £4.5 million for charity. Seeing those insane numbers and absorbing the deafening screams pitch side at Wembley, it was a real moment that demonstrated just how far we’d come since we produced our first charity match with the boys back in 2022 at The Valley, home of Charlton Athletic FC.
Live at this scale is a whole different ballgame and I won’t lie, when Jordan Schwarzenberger, manager of Sidemen, initially approached us just six weeks before the game in 2022, there was a voice in the room afterwards that said, ‘But what happens if we fuck it up?
Always one to push forward, my response was ‘But what happens if we absolutely nail it?’
Those weeks in the lead up were a total blur. As with all our projects we became a complete extension of the Sidemen team, manager Jordan Schwarzenberger, Anna Sirius, Jas Marwa and Victor Bengtsson, cementing a bond that was magnetic, energetic and full of mutual mass respect.
Having already delivered the as-live show uTure, the brainchild of YouTube Gaming legend Ali-A and a stellar team of talent behind the camera who’d worked on everything from BAFTAs and Lionesses Live to The Brits and Isle of Wight Festival, we rolled our sleeves up and got to work.
For any live show to be a success you need a great cast, and the Sidemen pulled in every top YouTuber in the country, plus an amazing lineup of presenter talent with Elz The Witch and Munya Chawawa as hosts and StephenTries and SpencerFC as commentators.
With YouTube part of After Party Studio’s DNA, it was imperative that our style of coverage for the game was reflective of the creators in the space – going beyond ‘traditional’ football match coverage to make fans truly feel part of it with reaction cams and selfie sticks.
The fanfare around the game was intense and with a pitch invasion and the stadium being locked down at one point, it was a real baptism of fire. But it was also a sellout crowd of 27,000 people with millions more watching on the stream and catchup, lauding our 360 degree coverage. We’d done it.
With that blueprint, it was time to go bigger. London Stadium sized in fact. The boys pulled in even bigger creators, including US talent like Mr Beast, meaning even more media attention. With the industry beginning to understand the untapped opportunities amongst this massively underserved audience, there were even bigger brand partners. And a much larger audience to service. Pressure. But we were ready. And the YouTube record-breaking views, 60,000 sell out crowd, and £2.4 million raised for charity proved it.
This year, tickets for 2025’s Sidemen Charity Match sold out a 90,000 seater Wembley Stadium in three hours. Brand juggernauts including Unilever’s Lynx and culture-defining sports brand, Footasylum were headline sponsors. Footasylum went one further and commissioned Specs’ Revenge – comedy spoof content with Specs Gonzalez filmed at the match itself for their digital channels (ideated by our very own Head of Entertainment Sam Ewen) – a whole new world of possibilities in the sports ents space which After Party Studios will continue to double down on.
Meanwhile, Sidemen Charity Match will no doubt become one of 2025’s biggest live streamed events of the year. So the next time someone says ‘but what happens if we fuck it up?’, put yourselves out there and absolutely nail it’.
Joshua Barnett is MD at After Party Studios
