Largest streamer in the country, Gaules targets new sports broadcasts in 2022

Throughout 2021, his tribe totaled more than 166 million hours watched in lives on Twitch. Numbers that make Gaules the most watched streamer in Brazil on the platform and the second most watched in the world — only Canadian Félix Lengyel, owner of the xQcOW channel, had more audience (272 million).

Tribo is the name of the community that follows Alexandre Borba Chiqueta, 38, better known by the nickname Gaules, which he has had since childhood.

When the paulista starts a broadcast, in a few minutes the group of followers soon shows up – on average, 19 thousand people watch the streamer’s lives, and the channel has already had peaks of 335 thousand simultaneous viewers.

The numbers, collected by the specialized website Sullygnome, have been on a growth curve since 2018, when the Twitch phenomenon emerged in Brazil. And they were decisive in opening other doors to the professional, such as partnerships to obtain the rights and broadcast traditional championships such as the NBA and F1 on their channel.

For him, the success is in the format of the transmissions. “When I started to be more of a companion for those who were following e-sports than being a narrator, I started to realize that the relationship was more human”, he tells the leaf.

It has been so successful that his goal is to expand his portfolio in 2022. In addition to maintaining the NBA and negotiating to have a regular F1 season, he dreams of broadcasting football championships. Meanwhile, he is about to launch a podcast in partnership with Ronaldo Fenômeno, in which, according to Gaules, the public will get to know the stories of other “phenomena”.

How did the idea for the podcast with Ronaldo come about? We met in August, in his office, and there we brainstormed about what we could do together. We missed a chat between people who have a phenomenal trajectory. There are many formats today of podcasts that are daily, have many guests, many stories and sometimes you end up not being able to keep up with everything. We thought of bringing a format with fewer stories, but stories of people who ended up conquering a place where many people are curious to know what it’s like. Ronaldo himself is an example. How did he become a phenomenon?

One of the first guests will be Neymar. Why do you believe that podcasts are able to have greater access to personalities who sometimes shun traditional outlets? A journalist goes after the news, the story, the information and often asks questions that he knows that, if he doesn’t ask, he ends up not being seen as a good journalist. And the journalist has to ask things that aren’t the nicest things to ask. The podcast format brought an approximation and took away some of the guest’s fear. It’s more of a chat, as it was with Neymar. We want to know things that friends ask other friends. It’s an informal chat. I don’t want to know anything controversial, I don’t want to know, for example, if the injury is improving. Find out if he will be out of the Cup. You are not wanting to take away any information that can sometimes harm you or put you in an unfair situation. You even end up asking relevant and even controversial things, but I think the way you ask changes. I think players, especially football players, are very sorry that sometimes the press neglects the human aspect of him.

How do you handle the responsibility of fostering debate on difficult topics, such as depression, which are constant in your lives? There is this responsibility that is individual in the sense that when a story comes, I have an empathy for the person. I won’t ignore this story, but I’m not responsible for it either. I am the same as everyone else in the Tribe, but I play a representative role. I started doing live at dawn, and at dawn you have many people who need help, attention, medical help, psychological help. A good way is always to guide the person to seek professional help. The only person who will save life is the doctor, the psychiatrist, the psychologist with therapy.

The media increasingly seeks interaction with the public, and in their broadcasts, this is a very present mark. How did you develop the broadcast format? When I started to stream and watch electronic sports championships, especially Counter Strike, I felt a lack of using what is modern. They took people who already had huge experience in the television market and brought them to the stream market. It’s just that a TV or a radio doesn’t have the modern tools that exist today on a Twitch. I missed the interaction. When I started to be more of a companion for those who wanted to follow e-sports than being a narrator, I started to realize that the relationship was more human.

Is this relationship that generates greater engagement with the public? In the traditional format, the person is there to watch what is happening. If it’s a soccer match, she’ll want to connect to watch the Brazilian national team play or to see her team play. And if not, there won’t be much to hold her back. I thought what’s happening turns out to be background. There are times when this plan is of great importance. But most of the time, in a long championship, in a regular season of the NBA, for example, with more than 80 games, I’m not so sure how much this content can capture and engage people. Now, when we bring content that is spectacular about basketball and have a good chat, I really believe that it engages people. So, it’s knowing how to use the content you’re bringing to your advantage and not just being dependent on that content.

How was the quest for NBA rights? The NBA quest is the result of a decision made starting last year when I decided to create a structure. I transformed Gaules into a company, which today is part of the Omelete group, and within the group there is, for example, CCXP, there are several other things, so it is a conglomerate of companies and structures, which has the best people to look for these dreams that were once impossible. If before, alone, it was sometimes very difficult to get a Counter Strike broadcast, within this structure, working closely with Pierre Mantovani [CEO do Omelete], he turned around and asked what I thought of broadcasting the NBA. I said “of course!”, and he, with his contacts, did all the bureaucratic part, we managed to open that door. An NBA would never allow a single streamer, in his house, to broadcast the NBA. Anyone who thinks this is is outdated.

What other championships are you working to bring? THE dream is to broadcast an Olympics, a World Cup, a Winter Olympics, X-Games. It has a lot of cool content. Football too, but in Brazil football is treated as a very serious thing. Sometimes it’s easier for us to get an NBA than it is to get a state championship. But I believe that, over time, people will begin to understand that we came to add, we did not come to take the audience away from traditional media. The NBA case is very important. They have metrics that show that we haven’t cannibalized any other broadcasts. In fact, the number all over the world has grown. So, wherever you want to have this kind of connection, we are open to broadcasting. I would like to broadcast football.

​​A Is the vision of businessmen from abroad, especially from the USA, different from the vision of Brazilians about broadcasting championships in lives? In the case of the NBA, what made it easier was for the league to look and say: “Our market is in the US, it’s in North America. If we do this test in Brazil and it goes really well, wonderful. If it goes wrong, it won’t be something that will harm the brand”. Our main sport is football, whenever you deal with the main sport you encounter barriers. But internally I feel a greater difficulty. I think it might happen that I first stream a league from outside the platform. It’s all very new, so the NBA case could change a lot.

Will you keep NBA and F1 for 2022? The NBA, yes. F1 is in negotiation. F1 is a slightly different contract. In the NBA, we will do the entire regular season, there are more than 80 games and the playoffs.

Would F1 be the regular season too? In 2021 you broadcast the São Paulo sprint race. We always look for the most complete possible. The first season of the NBA we broadcast the playoffs and, with what we delivered in the playoffs, we managed to extend it to do a complete job. With F1, we expect the same thing. With the São Paulo sprint broadcast, we hope to be able to expand this to the full season. But it’s still under negotiation.