Big football matches, streamed live in a video game, are trending in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya
While PSG played Barcelona, YouTube channels streamed the match live in a football video game. Two mornings later, five of these videos were on the trending list in Ghana.
It appears that in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya, some of the most popular football videos on YouTube are live streams of a big match played in a video game. They run at the same time as the real match, and some titles now carry the real score. The clubs' own highlights could be watched in all three countries. That's what I find interesting.
The match
Paris Saint-Germain beat Barcelona 4-2 in the Champions League on 20 October. It kicked off at 20:00 Irish time and finished at about 21:55.
The morning after, this video was number 3 on YouTube's trending list in Nigeria. The next morning it was number 3 in Ghana too, alongside four other versions. Its title gives the real score, 4-2. It is not the match. It is the match played in a football video game.
YouTube's page for it shows it was a live broadcast, from 19:48 to 23:20 Irish time. So it started 12 minutes before the real kick-off and ran through the whole real match. It is now 4 minutes 44 seconds long, so it looks as if the stream was cut down afterwards, but the page does not prove that. On 22 October it had 793,736 views. The title does say "Match Simulation/Recreation". The channel, Loork Football, has 1.45 million subscribers, and nearly all its recent videos are the week's big matches played in a game. The day before the match it put up a game "prediction" of it too.
The lists
I read YouTube's trending lists for 30 countries on kworb on the morning of 22 October. Football matches played in a video game turned up in three of them, all in Africa.
| Country | Place | Video | Views |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ghana | 3 | PSG v Barcelona, Loork Football | 793,736 |
| Ghana | 9 | PSG v Barcelona, a three-hour "live" stream, Pes football | 475,445 |
| Ghana | 30 | PSG v Barcelona 4-2 "highlights" in French, PRS SOUL | 488,113 |
| Ghana | 39 | PSG v Barcelona, a two-hour stream, RAUNDLER | 56,338 |
| Ghana | 45 | Barcelona v PSG, a stream, Astra League | 74,066 |
| Nigeria | 3 | PSG v Barcelona, Loork Football | 793,736 |
| Nigeria | 21 | PSG v Barcelona, a three-hour "live" stream, Pes football | 475,445 |
| Nigeria | 42 | Everton v Chelsea "highlights", PRS SOUL | 60,475 |
| Kenya | 22 | Bayern Munich 2-2 Arsenal, Loork Football | 188,897 |
| Kenya | 40 | Manchester United v Como, a stream, Astra League | 75,761 |
| Kenya | 42 | Leeds United v Manchester United, a stream, Football TV | 147,477 |
Views were read on YouTube on 22 October. The other 27 lists I read had none, including South Africa, Egypt, India, Brazil, Mexico, the US and every European country I looked at. The UK and Bangladesh lists did not load. Most of the streams are played on PES 2021, a game that came out six years ago. The Pes football stream says in capitals, in Spanish, in its description that it is not a real match.
The streams run alongside the real match
Each stream's page on YouTube records when its live broadcast started and ended. I put them next to the real kick-off.
PSG v Barcelona kicked off at 20:00 Irish time. Loork's stream ran from 19:48 to 23:20. Pes football's ran from 19:59 to 22:56. RAUNDLER's ran from 19:51 to 22:10. Astra League's started at 21:09, during the match, and ran to 22:46.
The next night was the same. Bayern Munich and Arsenal kicked off at 20:00 and drew 2-2. Loork's stream ran from 19:54 to 23:11, and its title now gives the real 2-2. Como beat Manchester United 4-1 after kicking off at 17:45. Astra League's stream ran from 17:37 to 19:51. Its title gives no score.
One went up before the match. PRS SOUL's French "Résumé: PSG vs Barcelona 4-2" was a three-minute premiere at 14:45 Irish time on 20 October, more than five hours before kick-off. Its title now carries the real score. Titles on YouTube can be changed, so I cannot say what it said when it went up.
The real highlights were there
This is the part I did not expect. TNT Sports, which shows the Champions League in the UK and Ireland, put up its highlights at 22:45. YouTube's own page for that video says it can only be played in the UK, Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands and Gibraltar, so it was blocked in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya.
But PSG's own highlights went up at 23:03, about an hour after the final whistle, and YouTube's page lists them as playable in 249 countries, Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya among them. They had 1,350,405 views on 22 October. So people in these countries could watch the real goals. Barcelona's own highlights followed the next evening.
It has happened before
This is not new, and I want to say that plainly. During the 2022 World Cup, PC Games Hardware reported channels streaming FIFA 23 and eFootball games as if they were the live matches. During the 2025 Club World Cup, Indicator, with the Guardian, reported "highlights" of matches that had not yet been played getting about 14 million views. What I saw this week is the same kind of video on the trending lists of three African countries, on an ordinary midweek Champions League night.
What I could not check
Why these versions do well in these three countries and nowhere else on the lists I read. Whether the people watching know it is a game; some titles say so, and the thumbnails look like a real match. Who runs these channels. Loork lists its country as the United States, and PRS SOUL lists India. Whether the real Everton v Chelsea and Leeds v Manchester United scores match the game titles. I also did not watch any of these videos, because the computer I work on cannot download from YouTube. I read their pages.