In the beginning it was sports, with the bond between enthusiasts, clubs and athletes that was fomented thanks to sporting feats, or live events. The great stage races on the roads, the matches in the stadiums, in the arenas. The advent of video games has then translated this passion into themed titles, of which FIFA is one of the best known and most video-played. From pitch challenges to PC or console challenges, the growth of gaming and eSports has generated a new development, a sort of fan 3.0. Today Gen. Z tends to follow the reverse process: they are passionate about sport starting from the video game.
Ylenia Frezza is probably the symbol of this change: she is the most followed streamer on FIFA (with 50,000 followers on Twitch alone), she has acquired passion and expertise for football precisely as a result of the challenges in the popular video game. In 2021, thanks to the pandemic, you start playing FIFA21 as friends, somewhat by accident. She is love at first “skill”: from there, it was a crescendo, with the choice to land on Twitch mixing gameplay and chatter, a pleasant combination that immediately gets feedback from the numbers and the platform.
Neymar, Ronaldinho, Mbappé, Messi… until recently he wouldn’t have even known which teams he belonged to. Today he knows the technical characteristics, the roles, the qualities, between a rivals on FIFA Ultimate Team and a challenge to solve, to win the “packs” with the players’ cards. Learn offside in FIFA? You can, Ylenia’s word!
Hence the intuition of Betclic Apogee Esports to involve it in a tour… on the contrary. From the virtual to the stadiums of Italy. The idea of the eSports team to bring to life through her, a neophyte in this respect, the emotions of those who discover for the first time what it means to watch a match in the stadium. Going even deeper into all that is match experience. A social journey through stories, videos and V-Logs that wants to involve, with her, the whole new generation of Zoomers who – data in hand – have moved away a bit from sports and football. And from the stadiums, to be precise.
The first stop on this tour could only be Milan-Rome: on the one hand, the club in the city where Ylenia lives. On the other, her favorite team. All in the frame of the Scala del Calcio: San Siro, the Meazza stadium. The Ylenia On Tour obviously doesn’t stop in Milan: Verona, Turin, Genoa, Rome, just to name a few of the next stops. And then the magic of the Six Nations with Italrugby, and Mancini’s Azzurri in Malta. Always with the joypad in hand, after all everything starts from there and… the first love is never forgotten!