Bleacher Report has cracked the Gen Z code with Creator League

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.

As Vice President and GM of House of Highlights—Bleacher Report’s social-first sports vertical founded in 2014 and acquired in 2015—he watched highlight consumption explode year over year. The brand was on its way to over 100 million followers across platforms, driving billions of monthly views.

But Muller also saw the other side of the equation. As part of Turner Sports (now TNT and part of Warner Bros. Discovery), he had a front-row seat to traditional sports broadcasting, and the data showed that the under-34 live sports viewing audience was collapsing. According to Bleacher Report’s research, Major League Baseball’s median viewer is 56 years old. The NHL’s is 52. The NBA’s is 49. Even NFL viewers skew older—47% are 55 and over, and only 17% are under 35.

“Something doesn’t add up here,” Muller recalls thinking back in 2020. House of Highlights’ numbers kept climbing. Gen Z’s appetite for sports content was undeniable. Yet they wouldn’t watch live games on TV.

But they would, Muller noticed, enthusiastically watch a four-hour livestream of a YouTube creator playing video games.

The solution to bridge that gap and satisfy that audience was the Creator League. And the hypothesis was simple: Meet Gen Z where they are—on YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok. But also meet them with people they care about, and in formats they understand.

Creator League built rosters for reality TV, not sports

To build a sports league out of thin air, you have to start with the games, right?

“No,” says Gilbert. “I think the creator content is first and foremost. We know the space we’re playing in. We’re leveraging the biggest names in the creator space, so we always have to stay true and authentic to that space.”

It makes sense. Traditional sports leagues have built fandom over generations through geographic loyalty and decades-long story arcs. It’s why leagues like the XFL and USFL, which lack that history, continually sprout up and fold. So, rather than fight that same battle—and risk the same fate—Gilbert and Muller dug into years of YouTube beef, Twitch streams, and TikTok drama. This is the new generation’s mythology, and the Creator League is built on it.

“You’re almost like a casting director for a Survivor-style show where you’re trying to introduce different personalities that could lead to controversy,” Muller explains. “You want someone that’s going to be the shit-talker—the villain. You want the good guy. You want the underdog. You really need to cast for every role.”

Casting creators goes beyond beef and personality. The league also needed creators who could actually move audiences. This meant targeting creators not with the largest followings, but with the most rabid, most engaged fans. “A lot of times,” Muller says, “we’ll prioritize working with someone who might have a fraction of the followers of someone else—if we see they can move 15,000 people to a video in an instant if they want to.”

How Creator League works

The 2025 season featured four team owners who exemplified this approach: JasonTheWeen, a 21-year-old FaZe Clan member known for viral IRL stunts; RayAsianBoy, who rose to fame after linking with Kai Cenat in Japan; YourRAGE, a veteran creator known for raw humor and live-streaming dominance; and Mark Phillips, the creative force behind RDCWorld1, the viral sketch comedy crew with over 1.7 billion YouTube views.

Each owner assembles a roster of fellow creators to compete across five sports from May through November—dodgeball, slamball (trampoline basketball), flag football, knockout basketball, and five-on-five basketball—with a $500,000 prize pool on the line. The rosters feature creators from each owner’s network: friends, collaborators, and fellow content creators who bring their own followings to their team. The competition unfolds like a season-long reality show where creators compete, trash-talk across platforms between events, and rally their fanbases to vote for in-game advantages.

They may not appear to be household names. But to Gen Z, they’re as recognizable as LeBron James and Lionel Messi.

These selections weren’t random, either. Gilbert and Muller looked for creators with strategic platform diversity—mixing Twitch stars with YouTube and TikTok personalities—all while hunting for preexisting storylines.

“Mark Phillips and YourRAGE have been talking trash for years about who’s more athletic—who’s better at this, who’s better at that,” Gilbert says. “We were able to leverage that to give a history to something that was basically still brand new.”

Fast-paced, fluid rules, no dead air

Casting solved the who. The harder question was how—how do you design competitions that keep a digital audience locked in when it has infinite options to click away?

They started with a constraint: No inventing new sports.

“They had to be familiar,” Gilbert says, “because we knew that with this generation, you only have such a short amount of time to clearly articulate what you’re trying to get them to come and watch.”

They settled on basketball, dodgeball, and flag football—sports everyone recognizes and understands. But understanding doesn’t equal engagement. For that, Gilbert’s team had to strip away everything that makes traditional sports drag so the pacing mirrors the live streams Gen Z already consumes—constant action, no lulls, face-forward intensity. One timeout instead of three. Running clocks. No halftime. Creators addressing the camera directly between plays. “We’re not trying to make any of these moments a dead period where we know the audience can look on the side of the screen, find another video, and click off pretty easily,” Gilbert says.

Even the rules themselves stay fluid. When a three-point conversion felt clunky during flag football’s regular season, Gilbert met with the creators, and they decided to pivot to a painted area—a conversion zone—for the championship instead. Problem solved.

“It’s our league,” Gilbert says. “We’ll change up rules as much as we need to to make it entertaining for the audience.”

The proof of concept came through incremental tests. In 2020 and 2021, House of Highlights created shows tied to major events like The Match, then tried standalone basketball knockout games. The FaZe Rug versus Adin Ross experiment in 2021 validated the core thesis. By 2022, they were ready for more structure: a one-on-one basketball tournament that culminated at the Final Four in New Orleans. The format kept evolving—two-on-two basketball at the 2023 Final Four, a one-on-one flag football season, and massive five-on-five events at DreamCon.

“It really evolved from big event to big event into something that could feel bigger or have this continuity and through line,” Muller says.

The tentpole strategy became crucial. By tying Creator League events to TNT Sports’ biggest moments—March Madness, MLB playoffs, major soccer tournaments—they gained access to production infrastructure and built-in audience attention. Bennett Spector, General Manager of Bleacher Report, saw the strategic advantage: “When TNT Sports is covering the college football playoff or Roland Garros or the MLB playoffs,” he says, “we thought that being able to power up Creator League events as a property and component of what those weekends feel like is where this could really blow up and grow from.”

Giving the fans—and the creators—control

The Creator League breaks a lot of rules that anchor traditional sports league models—focusing on creators instead of athletes being chief among them. But perhaps the biggest rule they’ve cast aside is not in how they’ve built the league, but in what they have given away.

Control.

Fans can vote in real-time on game-changing advantages. Which team gets an extra player in dodgeball? Fans vote. Who gets a power-up that makes all their baskets count for double the points for two full minutes? Viewers decide. Which team’s two-point conversion will be worth four points?—You get it.

Gilbert admits it’s “one of the most fun but most stressful parts of each live event” because outcomes become genuinely unpredictable. But that chaos creates the engagement that traditional sports can’t replicate. If enough supporters show up in the live chat at a given time, they can make sure that the creator they love—whose team they support—gets a power-up or a boost that could help them win the game, and the prize money. This means the creators themselves become recruiters. During voting windows, team owners lean into their cameras, practically pleading: “Go vote, go vote, go vote!”

This is not a brand begging for eyeballs or a commentator asking for engagement. It’s someone fans have watched for years, with whom they feel they have a relationship, asking for help—and the fans respond.

Control isn’t all the Creator League has given away. It’s given away some power, too—over both distribution and monetization. For 2025, team owners secured revenue-sharing deals and IP rights to create their own team merchandise.

“We really wanted to change the feeling of, ‘Here’s a check, come and show up for a couple of hours,’” Muller says. “If we’re going to have you put your name on this team and your face and the logo, we want you to feel both incentivized and proud to be a part of it.”

And while most media companies would lock down their intellectual property, the Creator League encourages co-streaming. Creators stream the events on their own channels simultaneously alongside House of Highlights and Creator League channels, so fans can watch the main broadcast on one screen and Mark Phillips’s handheld sideline stream on another. The key is that, to participate in polls and voting, users need to migrate to the main Creator League stream.

The result is “a uniquely complementary distribution model,” Gilbert says, where multiple streams amplify each other rather than cannibalize.

And it’s working. In 2025 alone, the Creator League generated 606 million views. Events averaged 123,606 concurrent viewers, with 81% of that live audience under 34. On House of Highlights’ channel, Creator League content averaged 2.9 million cross-platform views per post—outperforming both college football and NHL content, and nearly matching NBA and NFL highlights.

That reach has attracted big brand partners. Pizza Hut signed a seven-figure deal to sponsor three events, joining a roster that includes Nissan, Apple, Samsung, Netflix, PlayStation, and Corona.

The insight: Giving away control doesn’t dilute the product. It multiplies it.

Bleacher Report systematized disruption

The Creator League is not a one-off success story. It’s the latest example in a pattern that Bleacher Report has repeated for nearly two decades: identify where audiences are going before they get there, build for that future, and don’t bind yourself to what worked yesterday.

“Bleacher has a rich history of disrupting itself,” Spector says. “You have to accept fate, that this is a reality. People have gone off-platform, and this is what fans want. And once you accept the reality that you might not have all of the ingredients owned, your world looks much more free. It’s not only okay to disrupt yourselves, it’s actually encouraged within these walls.”

The company’s late-2015 acquisition of House of Highlights, which has grown to 100 million followers across platforms, has given it an invaluable lab in which to make and test assumptions. The Bleacher Report brand caters to current consumption trends while House of Highlights operates as “a speedboat out in front,” Spector says, focused on young and emerging audiences. With access to the younger demo, House of Highlights tests. When something works, it scales.

The Creator League itself is proof. What started as a two-person iPhone stream in 2021 grew into a multi-event franchise that now, in 2025, generates more than 600 million views.

This, combined with access to TNT Sports’ infrastructure and a long-standing tradition of hiring from within target demographics—people solving problems for themselves and their peers, not from textbooks or in theory—positions Bleacher Report to make big bets, which they often win.

In 2014, Spector greenlit Game of Zones, an animated NBA parody of Game of Thrones pitched by two freelance animators. At the time, no major sports media company had ventured into fictional, comedy-driven animation. Bleacher Report did, timing the show’s release to run alongside TNT’s NBA coverage, using the network’s reach to amplify the digital series. The show earned multiple Emmy nominations and ran for seven seasons.

Four years later, Bleacher Report launched The Champions, an animated series about UEFA Champions League players, strategically timed to Turner’s acquisition of Champions League broadcast rights. It became the publisher’s most-watched show ever. That formula—bold, creative bets paired with TNT’s tentpole events—became a blueprint for the Creator League.

The validation for the Creator League is in the competitors and copycats. The NBA has launched its own Creator Cup. The NFL brought creators to the Super Bowl. In Europe, Gerard Piqué’s Kings League and the Baller League are selling out stadiums—taking what Bleacher Report has proven digitally and translating it to physical venues packed with fans.

Which is exactly where Spector sees this heading. The Creator League has captured the digital, at-home audience traditional sports are losing. The next frontier, according to Spector, is bringing those 123,000 concurrent viewers—81% of them under 34—into actual arenas. Building the merchandise ecosystems. Creating destination events around TNT Sports’ biggest weekends that feel less like marketing activations and more like Coachella for sports fans raised on YouTube.

“Money follows,” Spector says. “I think that is often the mantra—the ethos—that we try and apply to our content strategy and programming philosophy. If you can scale an engaged, scaled audience, the money will follow. Start with the audience problem. Solve that, and the business will take care of itself.”