Masters of Madness: New football format shakes up the rules of sportainment By Adrian Pennington Monday, June 16, 2025 - 11:38
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The ball is round, but that's where the comparison with regular football stops. Scoring by hand, no headers or offsides, unlimited substitutions, balls fired from cannons and coaches who go on the field to kick a penalty are all part of Masters of Madness which aired in Belgium earlier this year.
This is the latest new soccer format targeting younger generations on social media (see also The Sidemen, Baller League and Kings World Cup Clubs).
Read more The Sidemen vs YouTube All-Stars: Marrying pro-soccer coverage with creator presentation
Masters of Madness is designed as a new football competition format with shorter, faster games for younger TV viewers, streamers and YouTubers rolled into a daily sports entertainment show.
It's not's conceived to replace anything. That would be a bit crazy, says Serge Bellens, head of directors at Play Sports. Well, okay, we do try to do something crazy but it's not in competition with regular football. It's not going to replace the Champions League or national club competitions. That wasn't the starting point at all. We wanted to try and make something new that can coexist alongside regular season football and be something fun to watch during the Christmas holidays up to the end of March.
The league's first season was played in December at Antwerp's Google Pixel Arena and broadcast earlier this year on Play Media's commercial channel Play4, the network's GoPlay streaming service and on YouTube.
It is the brainchild of media production companies Woestijnvis and Sporthouse Group and two ex-pros: former Belgian Footballer of the Year, striker Dries Mertens who won 100 caps; and Ajax and Spurs central defender Jan Vertonghen who played 157 times for the Belgian national team.
Every decision was made with them and run by Dries and Jan, says Bellens. It was Jan's idea for instance not to have any headers during the game.
The basic concept is a six versus six indoor football competition played between eight mixed gender teams on a pitch measuring 46m x 26m. The teams are made up of amateur players, ex-pro players, personalities from the world of football and celebrities. Each match comprises four quarters of eight minutes. The teams play the entire match on the same side of the field. The home team defends the left goal, the away team the right goal (TV view). The LED boarding surrounding the pitch is playable to create a faster game.
So far, so conventional. However, games can be switched up in all manner of novel ways. Maddies' and Boosters' are played like Jokers' by team coaches or by the officials. They include adding an extra ball onto the field (fired by cannons), raising the height of the goal by 50cm, reducing the number of on-field players and introducing zones on the pitch which can't be played in. Goals might count double for a limited period, the goalkeeper and an outfield player have to switch positions, one team's goalkeeper can be penalised for actually using their hands and there's a Hand of God' in which one team can use their hands to play the ball like Maradona did in 1986 . On certain match days, teams can even add a legend' to their team, won via social media challenges.
It is certainly quite different but that was also what was exciting, because we created the crazy ourselves, says Bellens, a highly experienced live match director who calls the shots for Play Sports' UEFA Europa and Conference League games and was involved from in Masters of Madness from its inception, including helping devise the rules of the game.
He has also worked as live producer for HBS on match coverage during the 2022 FIFA World Cup Qatar and previously at FIFA World Cups in Brazil, Russia and UEFA Euro 2020. At the same time, he is also a senior match director for VTM (DPG Media), covering the Belgian national football team, the UEFA Champions League and the Belgian Cup.
We'd seen the success of other initiatives and that gave us the opportunity to do something completely new. We wanted to get rid of the things that happen in a normal football game that younger people might consider to be boring. Our goal was to create something shorter, faster and perhaps more immersive, meaning to keep the viewers' attention span awake, he says.
We wanted to divide each 8-minute quarter into certain moments where something exciting, new or surprising could happen which you don't expect, because, of course, it's not allowed in a regular game.
Test runs of the gameplay and production took place in a warehouse. It was a very basic test but with all the technical aspects in place, Bellens explains. One of the things we tested was the length of the quarters. Should they be 8 or 10 minutes, 12 or 15? Should we do two x 15 minutes or two x 10 minutes? What would work best for getting optimum attention for audiences? If we went with two halves of ten minutes and we wanted to include two Boosters for each team and a Maddy during the game, and maybe even another extra Maddy surprise, that would be too much. We had to get the balance right.
They finalised on four times eight minutes, incorporated a countdown clock (familiar to US sports like NFL or hockey) and rejected some Maddy and Booster ideas because they either didn't work or they were too complicated to understand immediately for players or viewers.
At this stage the production didn't test results with social media influencers but Bellens says that across the production team the younger generation target audience was well represented.
We also wanted to keep it a secret, he says. We did make an edit of the shows and showed that to people
