Sneaky YouTubers pose as World Cup participants while playing fake football matches.
With the help of FIFA 23 simulations, clever YouTube channels have discovered a way to capitalise on World Cup mania by airing fictitious football matches.
Google Trends validates the recent spike in interest in the term “World Cup stream,” which indicates that some of these films have amassed tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of views, most likely fooling people who are looking for live pirate streaming of the World Cup.
A reader reportedly told the Vietnamese news website VNExpress that one such video uploaded close to the start of the World Cup misled them into thinking it was just a poor stream.
“I didn’t realise it was the image in the FIFA 23 game simulating the World Cup until I read the comments on the livestream and watched the player’s face up close,” they claimed.
Minute90Kplus, a YouTube channel that VNExpress featured, recently posted a number of films and livestreams of World Cup games that were replicated in eFootball (formerly PES) and FIFA 23.
On Tuesday, one stream received 214,000 views.
The most watched video from eight days ago has 277,000 views, but according to YouTube’s conversation replay feature, There don’t seem to be many viewers watching these feeds very often.
If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say they’re simply paying attention long enough to realise they’re not viewing the actual object.
There don’t seem to be many viewers watching these feeds very often.
If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say they’re simply paying attention long enough to realise they’re not viewing the actual object.
But from a camera angle high above the field, eFootball21 and FIFA 23 can appear rather realistic.
I can understand how folks could be duped if the quality was reduced to around 240p.
Although they don’t always strive to entirely conceal the fact that the footage is false, I was able to find a number of other Vietnamese World Cup channels.
However, the hashtag #WorldCup2022 implies they are trying to attract some World Cup fans.
There was a lot of interest in the 2018 World Cup, according to FIFA, which estimated that 3.57 billion people watched it.
Vietnamese YouTube channels barely have exclusive rights to the fake match trick:
Due to the same strategy, the English channel Football Live, for instance, has 1.25 million subscribers. Countless YouTube users also record themselves watching World Cup matches with names like “BRAZIL versus SOUTH KOREA LIVE Stream Watchalong” in an effort to gain some attention.
Some of these movies force you to watch a few adverts right away, so even from viewers who leave as soon as they discover they’re not going to watch the match, they will still make a little amount of money from ads.
