Inside Miami’s Tropical Park, a 275-acre urban park in South Miami, Baller League’s 3,500-seat custom-built arena has been hosting six six-a-side soccer games every Thursday since March that feel less like soccer matches and more like an underground computer game manifested physically.

“Welcome to a new era of soccer,” reads the banner stretched along the side of the pitch, greeting fans as they enter the arena.

Inside, influencers pace the sidelines talking to cameras. Music pounds through the walls where tween and teen boys in groups sit practically on top of the pitch, watching their favorite creators livestreaming courtside to millions of followers online. Smoke machines fire after goals. A former global superstar is casually coaching a six-a-side team beneath LED boards designed for social clips.

The entire venue feels engineered for modern attention spans: shorter games, constant action, no dead air and every angle optimized for YouTube, Twitch and social feeds — and, naturally, for a younger audience that is heavily, if not all, male.

And that distinction matters when discussing one of Baller League’s most obvious unanswered questions: Where is the women’s version?

“We need to,” Felix Starck, the co-founder and CEO of Baller League, told The Athletic. “We’re going to launch a women’s league within the next six to 12 months.

“But then we need to talk about the other thing. We want to pay the female player the same as the male player. That’s our ambition. We’re not going to do a female league if we don’t achieve that. You can mark my words.”

In order to achieve equal pay, Starck says the challenge is the business side.

The creator-led soccer league, co-founded by Starck and German former soccer players Mats Hummels and Lukas Podolski, does not describe itself as a media company disguised as a sports property. In Starck’s mind, the actual sport is the product. The creators, celebrities and Twitch personalities embedded into the league’s foundation are unique accelerants helping audiences discover it faster. Notable influencers involved include Druski (12 million Instagram followers and 5 million YouTube subscribers), IShowSpeed (53.8 million YouTube subscribers) and Marlon (2.2 million Twitch followers). Other team captains include sports legends Usain Bolt (13.8 million Instagram followers) and Ronaldinho (77.4 million Instagram followers).

In just two years, Baller League has gone from a pandemic startup in Germany to one of the fastest-growing sports entertainment brands in Europe, drawing up to 2.5 million unique viewers on match days and securing a $25 million Series A funding round in December 2024 led by EQT Ventures. The league also received significant investment from sports-focused investment firm Apex Capital, alongside individual creators, to fuel international expansion.

The league launched operations in Miami in March and secured a broadcast partnership with CBS, a “nice to have” though not necessarily essential for a league endemic to YouTube, Twitch and social platforms, where its core audience already lives. The league’s U.S. division will hold its playoffs on Saturday in Miami.

“We don’t need a traditional media deal to be seen,” Starck said. “The majority of the sport leagues need a media deal, not necessarily only to make revenue from it. More than the cash, they need the exposure. We reach people without the need of having a traditional broadcast partner.”

Which is precisely why the league’s biggest unanswered question is not whether it can attract viewers. It already has. It also attracted sponsors such as Nike, Kalshi, Celsius, Gatorade and State Farm. The real question is whether a business model designed so specifically around young male creator culture can eventually make room for the women’s game, too, including the female fans who will want to engage.

Starck says launching a women’s league is his “dream.” Internally and economically, however, the current business model suggests it is nowhere close to becoming a priority. Not that he does not believe in women’s soccer. He does. The problem is viewership that brings sponsors.

“Sponsors immediately ask if we can guarantee the same impressions and viewers (between men’s games and women’s games), and realistically in Season 1, we probably can’t,” he said. “There’s no female IShowSpeed equivalent we can tap into yet, so suddenly sponsors don’t want to pay the same fees, not even close, not even miles far from it, and you want to pay the same to your ecosystem. So how is that working?

“I’m not going to produce the women’s league with two cameras while the men’s league gets 16. If we do it, we do it at the same level,” he added. “The challenge is sponsors still ask whether the impressions, media value and viewership will match the men’s side, and many don’t want to pay the same if they believe the audience won’t be equal right away.”

Baller League isn’t the only small-side pro league. In Spain, former Barcelona star Gerard Pique launched a seven-a-side Kings League in 2023 and expanded to Mexico, Italy and Brazil. The league added the women’s version, Queens League, in 2023, first in Spain, and has expanded to Queens League Americas in 2025. Both leagues pay their men and women players equally.

In the U.S., The Soccer Tournament is proving Baller League is not the only player exploring alternative soccer formats. After launching in 2023, the annual seven-a-side competition already operates men’s and women’s tournaments with identical $1 million winner-take-all prize pools. This summer, TST is expanding further with the launch of a mixed-gender tournament, again built around a $1 million grand prize, featuring teams and competitors including Landon Donovan, Hope Solo, Wrexham AFC and Pique’s Kings League All-Stars.

“Our women’s bracket has surpassed the men’s bracket when it comes to sponsorship and ticket revenue,” Jon Mugar, the founder and CEO of TST, told The Athletic. “The only place the women’s bracket trails the men’s bracket is the number of teams that apply.”

One thing is certain: The current Baller League audience is built around creator ecosystems dominated by gaming culture, football meme culture and livestream behavior, and is overwhelmingly young, male and digitally native.

“We need the right brands to be with us and say, we trust in the education piece, and we trust it’s going to take a year or two or three years longer until both leagues have equal viewing,” Starck said. “Why? There are less females on YouTube than male, and fewer female on Twitch than male. We cannot ignore the data. How many 30-year-old women are on Twitch?”

That line accidentally explains why a women’s league would likely require a different creator ecosystem, different sponsors, different engagement expectations and possibly even different success metrics. That is not impossible. But it does mean building a parallel business model rather than simply copying the men’s version with female players. And Starck says this will take time.

And right now, Baller League appears far more interested in proving scalability than experimentation.

The league already hit turbulence in Germany, where it originated. Earlier this year, Baller League halted operations there to focus on the U.K. and U.S. markets instead. Starck described the move less as a retreat and more as a learning experience. Germany taught the company how fragile audience perception can become once negative momentum forms.

That lesson matters because women’s sports launches are often judged far more harshly and far more quickly than men’s equivalents. Starck appears to be aware of the risk.

It also most accurately explains why a women’s Baller League is not imminent. That is because Baller League is not operating like a mission-driven social enterprise; it is operating like a startup trying to establish product-market fit before expanding horizontally.

Right now, the company still centrally controls all 12 teams in each market. It pays players itself. It owns the intellectual property. Eventually, the plan is to sell franchises to investors once fans begin attaching themselves emotionally to individual teams rather than the league overall.

Of a women’s Baller League, Starck said: “Don’t do it because it’s valuable right now. I couldn’t care less. Yesterday, I was eating lunch, and I watched the NWSL game on TV, on ESPN Deportes, and it was produced with two cameras. We are not going to do that.”