A YouTuber invested in the e-sports team MAD Lions in 2018, but years later he calls the decision one of the worst investments of his life.
Who is it about?
- Guillermo Díaz Ibáñez (30), better known as Willyrex, is one of the largest Spanish YouTubers
- The Willyrex channel has 17.2 million subscribers. On another channel called “TheWillyrex,” the YouTuber has 18.4 million subscribers.
- On his channels, Willyrex showcases gaming and reaction content, having started with games like CoD MW2 and Minecraft around 12 years ago. However, he gained particularly high views with videos about GTA Online and Fortnite.
- Recently, Willyrex released numerous videos about the party game “Golf it”
In October 2023, Willyrex, along with three other Spanish content creators, founded the podcast “spicy4tuna,” which is available on its own YouTube channel. In the context of the podcast, the 30-year-old spoke about his investment in e-sports and explained why it had been one of the worst investments of his life (via YouTube).
YouTuber invests in team that then gets sold
What made it such a bad investment? In the podcast, Willyrex explains that he has made some bad investments in his life. One of the worst, in his view, was investing in e-sports a second time and becoming a co-owner of the team “MAD Lions.”
The MAD Lions were one of the most followed e-sports teams in Spain at that time and had achieved good results, according to our Spanish colleagues from 3DJuegos.
However, Willyrex explains in the podcast that the company behind the team had financial problems just months after his arrival. Shortly thereafter, the Canadian company OverActive Media took over the team.
Willyrex says: “I joined a few months earlier with a much higher valuation, and a team from Canada came and said: ‘My team is worth 100 million, and yours is worth one million, now you have 0.0X% of my company.’ I went from my MAD Lions team to a 0.0% stake in a Canadian company.”
OverActive Media manages not only the MAD Lions but also the Overwatch team “Toronto Defiant” and the CoD team “Toronto Ultra.”
“It was as if I were obligated to something”
Why was the investment so bad for him? As Willyrex explains in the podcast, it was not the financial loss that was the problem, but the fact that he went from being a majority owner to someone who had little influence on the project. That he had to be committed to something that was not his:
It was so ridiculous that I was completely discouraged. The times when I went to events were very good at first, but then I stopped going. It was as if I were obligated to something. It was the worst feeling I ever had in my life […] What I remember poorly is promoting something that was not mine […].
Willyrex on the spicy4tuna podcast via YouTube
Even though Willyrex is not satisfied with his engagement with the MAD Lions and even calls it “one of the worst investments” of his life in the podcast, the team is still active today.
Willyrex is not the only content creator to invest in e-sports. Many YouTubers and streamers even form their own teams. One of them is Jeremy “Disguised Toast” Wang:
