In 2021, two people you’ve probably never heard of—FaZe Rug and Adin Ross—faced off in a one-on-one basketball game at a Los Angeles gym. Winner gets $25,000. Sam Gilbert led a two-person team that streamed it live on YouTube from a single iPhone. The players weren’t professional athletes, and it was, Gilbert says, “a very below average basketball game.” Still, nearly 80,000 people tuned in live, most of them under 34 years old.
“That was the biggest eye opener to me,” says Gilbert, director of content for Bleacher Report’s House of Highlights. “That’s when I knew there was something here.”
Gilbert saw that something fundamental had shifted in sports consumption. The names mattered in the same way fans tune in to watch Luka Doncic or Victor Wembanyama. But personality and creator fandom trumped talent and quality of play. FaZe Rug and Adin Ross command audiences of millions across YouTube and Twitch—deeply engaged fans who, when the two faced off in real time, showed up.
It was a test, Gilbert says. And its success became the foundation for Bleacher Report’s Creator League, a sports league where social media’s biggest personalities compete in basketball, dodgeball, and flag football for cash prizes that can stretch well into six figures.
Young viewers are tuning in. A dodgeball match at DreamCon in 2022 generated over 80 million views with 7 million engagements and climbed as high as the No. 2 trending video on YouTube. In 2025 alone, the league generated 606 million views—a 60% increase from the previous year.
So how does a made-up sports league that features average, amateur athletes regularly outperform mainstream sports and entertainment on social media, all while reaching the seemingly unreachable Gen Z demographic?
Meeting them where they are isn’t enough
Drew Muller had a numbers problem that didn’t make sense.
