Sports
When IShowSpeed Went Head-to-Head With Africa’s Strongest Woman
What happens when popular streamer IShowSpeed goes head-to-head with Africa’s strongest woman? Well, the competition was less about battling and more about shedding a new light on the African continent, something Speed has tried to do across his whirlwind “Speed Does Africa” tour. The 20-year-old American streamer, known for his antics and fast pace (it’s in the name after all), turned heads when he trained with Chido Maenzanise, a native Zimbabwean who was crowned “Africa’s Strongest Woman” and holds 10 gold medals from strongwoman competitions.
The “Speed Does Africa” tour blends the streamer’s amped-up antics with regional sights and culture. Speed, born Darren Watkins, Jr, used this same formula on his tours of Australia and New Zealand in 2024 and South America in 2025. His energetic style creates a distinct form of travel content that blurs the line between spectacle and participation, turning local customs and attractions into moments of shared celebration rather than detached observation. In Zimbabwe, that approach shifted the focus away from Speed himself and toward the people and traditions shaping the moment.
In Context
This part of the tour continues Speed’s competitive streak, just after he raced a cheetah in South Africa. The YouTube phenomenon also raced American sprinter Noah Lyles, the reigning Olympic 100-meter gold medalist, in 2024 for a charity event coordinated by MrBeast. The feats of strength took place in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. Speed and Maenzanise lifted tires and pulled cars at an underpass at Trabablas Interchange, Zimbabwe’s largest roadway, which was recently redeveloped under a controversial infrastructure project by President Emmerson Mnangagwa (according to the Africa Report). Over 40 million people watched the stream live. Zimbabwe was the third stop on the “Speed Does Africa” tour, continuing the streamer’s journey in the southern part of the continent, after visiting Angola, South Africa, Mozambique, Eswatini and Botswana, before moving onto Zambia.
Speed’s decision to spotlight an internationally recognized strongwoman for a global audience reflects his broader approach to blending entertainment with visibility, particularly as women’s strength sports continue to gain wider recognition. The visually striking image of a professional strongwoman pulling a car alongside him transformed the challenge into a collaborative spectacle, one that translated naturally to a livestream format without reducing the athlete to a prop.
Large crowds were drawn to witness the spectacle, which culminated with IShowSpeed and Maenzanise racing while pulling cars and Zimbabwe’s strongest man Arnold Zikhali pulling a truck with Speed sitting on top of it. Zimbabwe carries a long history shaped by colonial extraction, political instability, and decades of economic hardship, factors that have often defined how the country is portrayed to outside audiences. Those narratives tend to flatten a place better understood through its people, communities, and everyday expressions of pride and skill. Moments like Speed’s training session and competition with Maenzanise and Zikhali offer a different entry point, one rooted in local talent rather than inherited assumptions.
Zooming Out
Africa is the world’s youngest continent and is poised to become its fastest-growing region both economically and by population, a shift that could see it overtake Asia as early as 2026, according to the Financial Times’ David Pilling. That growth, paired with a predominantly mobile-first media landscape, has made the continent increasingly important to the global content economy. While many Africans push back against being grouped into a single narrative, given the region’s vast diversity in culture, history, and scale, creators have continued to engage audiences across the continent in more localized ways. IShowSpeed carried that approach forward with the next stop on his “Speed Does Africa” tour, broadcasting an “IRL stream” from Zambia.
Sports
YouTube Bids for 2030 and 2034 World Cup US Rights
YouTube is one of five bidders chasing the next two World Cups for American viewers. Its wedge against Netflix, Disney, Amazon, and Apple is a creator layer built around IShowSpeed.
Darren Watkins Jr., the streamer known as IShowSpeed, will lead a team on a rink turned pitch in Central Park this weekend. YouTube wants FIFA to watch it as an audition.
The platform is one of five names chasing the US broadcast rights to the 2030 and 2034 FIFA World Cups. CNBC reported that Netflix, Disney and Alphabet’s YouTube are all interested in challenging Fox for the two tournaments, with Amazon and Apple able to enter the mix. FIFA and the prospective partners expect to open discussions within the next three months.
YouTube’s separator is its creator layer. The platform has built the YouTube FIFA Creator Cup around IShowSpeed, and Tubefilter argues YouTube’s soccer community is large enough that the platform could supply local commentators for every country’s matches. That pitch treats creators as broadcast infrastructure, not warm-up acts, which is the shift the whole creator sports category has been waiting for.
What the last rights holder paid sets the floor. Fox secured the 2026 US English-language rights for $485 million. Media executives are budgeting between $1.5 billion and $2 billion for each of the 2030 and 2034 tournaments, per CNBC’s sources, several times that English-language figure.
FIFA has told media companies that English- and Spanish-language US rights are likely to sell together this time, rather than split as they were for 2026. CNBC’s sources expect that bundling to push the price higher still.
Those numbers put a creator-native platform in the same room as legacy sports broadcasters for the first time at this scale.
The Creator Cup carries the demonstration. The first one streams live at 5 p.m. ET on July 12 from Wollman Rink in Central Park, carried on FIFA’s official YouTube channel and simulcast on IShowSpeed’s channel. Cafu and Marco Materazzi coach the two sides. Pierluigi Collina referees.
IShowSpeed framed the event as an extension of the tournament itself, telling announcement coverage he wanted to bring the World Cup’s energy to Central Park.
The bid is not a clean run. YouTube was on track for a multi-game NFL deal this season, but that plan fizzled after the league handed a coveted Australia game to Netflix. Tubefilter identifies that setback as a roadblock to YouTube’s live sports strategy.
A rights win would move multilingual creator commentators from supplemental content to official broadcast infrastructure. It would give the platform’s soccer creators, the people who already pull audiences match by match, a formal role inside the sport’s biggest event. The Creator Cup exists to show FIFA that outcome before the negotiating table is set.
The formal talks begin within three months. The Cup kicks off first, on July 12.
Sports
IShowSpeed Draws 9.2 Million for Portugal’s World Cup Opener
A creator with a licensed match feed pulled 9.2 million to Portugal’s World Cup opener. The deal behind it, signed with FIFA, Fox, and YouTube, is the first of its kind for U.S. audiences.
The 9.2 million viewers who watched Portugal’s World Cup opener with Darren Watkins Jr. did not see a watch-along. They saw a licensed broadcast, carried by a creator for the first time at a FIFA World Cup in the United States.
Watkins, the streamer known as IShowSpeed, drew that audience on his YouTube feed for Portugal against DR Congo on June 17, a figure reported by Yahoo Sports. The number arrived through a partnership with FIFA, Fox Sports, and YouTube that lets him display official game feeds from host stadiums and his home studio, described as a first for U.S. audiences.
That is the shift creator sports has waited on. For years the expectation was that a rights holder would carve out a formal broadcaster slot for a creator, and this deal codifies it at the largest event in the sport rather than leaving it to organic watch-alongs and clip licensing.
Portugal and DR Congo finished 1-1 on the opening night of Group K.
The Feed Made It Official
The structure splits by geography. For American fans, Speed’s simulcasts run on the Fox One Prime Channel on YouTube and the Fox One streaming service. Viewers outside the United States reach the streams through his personal channel but do not see the licensed game feed.
The right to show that feed is the whole story. A creator reacting to a match he cannot legally display is a watch-along. A creator authorized to carry the live footage is a broadcaster, and Speed is now the second kind.
He had built toward it. Speed hosted a simulcast of YouTube’s Week 1 NFL broadcast the previous fall, a pattern of rights-holder partnerships rather than borrowed clips.
Speed announced the deal on his own YouTube stream. “You guys are going to be able to watch some of the World Cup games right here on my stream,” he said.
The Template Everyone Can Now Copy
For the next tier of creators, the lesson is about what gets negotiated. The ceiling used to be personality-based adjacency, a large audience parked next to a broadcast it had no rights to touch. Speed’s deal moves that ceiling to formal rights access, a slot inside the media-rights package itself.
His tournament has been a touring one. Speed attended the USA vs. Paraguay opener at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles on June 13, hitting 55 million YouTube subscribers mid-match. He has since streamed from stadiums across the host country while hosting other matches from his desktop setup.
FIFA had signaled its backing before any feed changed hands. President Gianni Infantino granted Watkins the first official FIFA Fan ID ahead of the tournament, institutional endorsement that predated the broadcast deal.
The tour hit a snag on July 2. Speed planned to attend Portugal’s Round of 32 match against Croatia in Toronto but was grounded in the Bay Area by plane issues, NBC Bay Area reported. He streamed instead from a watch party at San Francisco’s Thrive City, meeting fans and playing mini soccer at halftime.
The Fox schedule runs on. Speed’s group-stage simulcasts continued with Argentina vs. Austria in Dallas on June 22, Norway vs. France in Boston on June 26, and Colombia vs. Portugal in Miami on June 27. Fox has said he will stream the semifinals and the final, with select knockout matches still to be named.
Sports
JasonTheWeen Beats AsianJeff by Decision at NMS Boxing 4
Jake Paul Built Influencer Boxing. Streamers Now Run It. JasonTheWeen’s latest boxing event drew over 100k live viewers for NMS Boxing 4.
Five years to the day after Logan Paul went the distance with Floyd Mayweather and proved a YouTuber could sell a million pay-per-views, JasonTheWeen got his hand raised on a fight card he built himself. He beat AsianJeff by unanimous decision in the main event of NMS Boxing 4 on June 6, the biggest win of his boxing career.
The number that mattered was not on the judges’ scorecards. It was 100,160: the peak concurrent audience watching him do it, live and free, on Twitch, with no promoter and no pay-per-view wall in sight.
That gap, between Logan Paul needing Mayweather and a stadium and a $49.99 buy-in, and a streamer drawing six figures of live attention to a card he ran out of his own community, is the whole story of where influencer boxing has gone in five years.
The Fight
The main event went the full distance. Jason worked the body through long stretches, the kind of unglamorous accumulation that wins rounds on paper, and the official NMS Boxing YouTube channel posted footage of him controlling the final seconds of round three before the cards came back in his favor.
One sequence in that third round became the night’s talking point. Camera angles circulating afterward appeared to show a knockdown caused by water on the canvas rather than a clean punch. No primary source confirmed how the judges scored the moment, and organizers issued no formal ruling. It is a small thing, a wet spot on a canvas, but it points at the larger question hanging over the entire DIY tier of this sport, which is who exactly is regulating it.
The Lane Jake Paul Paved
None of this exists without the blueprint laid down at the top of the sport. Jake Paul began his boxing career in 2018 with a white-collar bout against fellow YouTuber Deji, a fight most of the boxing world treated as a stunt. He did not treat it as one. He hired real coaches, made it a full-time job, and in 2021 founded Most Valuable Promotions with Nakisa Bidarian, turning the joke into an industry.
The numbers since have stopped being funny to anyone. Logan Paul versus Mayweather drew roughly a million pay-per-view buys in June 2021. Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson landed on Netflix in November 2024 and, by the platform’s own count, reached 108 million viewers, helping drive 18.9 million new subscribers in a single quarter. KSI’s Misfits Boxing promotion has been valued at over £100 million. And the money flows to fighters in a way the establishment never matched: where the UFC pays its athletes a reported 17 percent of revenue, top influencer boxers can take home as much as 60 percent of an event’s haul.
The reason it works is the same reason traditional purists hate it. The draw was never technical mastery. It is the storyline, the personality, the pre-built audience that follows a creator into the ring with no marketing spend required. When Jake Paul announces a fight, tens of millions of people see it for free within a day. A world champion with a better jab and 2 million followers cannot buy that reach. Influencer boxing did not out-box traditional boxing. It out-distributed it.
The Streamer-Run Model Underneath It
What Paul built at the blockbuster level, JasonTheWeen is replicating at street level, and that is the part worth paying attention to. NMS Boxing has no Netflix deal, no PPV platform, no promoter taking a cut. The series runs entirely on Jason’s existing Twitch community, which means the audience and the infrastructure are the same asset.
The NMS Boxing 4 broadcast made the case better than any pitch deck could. Across a card running just over four hours, the stream averaged 63,559 concurrent viewers, peaked at 100,160, pulled in more than 290,000 hours watched, and added 4,100 followers in a single night. Those are numbers that established cable sports programming would envy, produced with none of the overhead.
The undercard delivered the night’s sharpest moment, too. Russell knocked out Average Harry, which organizers called the first knockout in the series’ history, the kind of milestone that gives a young promotion its own folklore. The full card also ran Alex Wasabi against Landon, Sapnap against Blau, Primate Paige against PeachJars, Diana Lim against Sabrina Alvarez, and BigEx against Pilat, a lineup pulling from across the creator world rather than the boxing one.
The Catch
The same thing that makes the model powerful, no gatekeepers, is what makes critics nervous. Officials in established boxing have warned for years that the influencer wave puts undertrained novices into bouts under serious rules, and that loose standards eventually produce real danger. The British Boxing Board of Control has been among the loudest on this point. A streamer-run card with no sanctioning body and a knockdown nobody can definitively explain is, fairly or not, exactly the scenario those warnings describe. It does not negate the achievement. It is the bill that comes due as the format scales down from arenas to community-run events.
JasonTheWeen has not announced a date for NMS Boxing 5. With a 100,000-viewer peak on a self-produced card, the only real question is how soon. Jake Paul made influencer boxing a business the establishment had to respect. The streamers who grew up watching him are now proving it does not need the establishment at all.