As the 2026 World Cup plays out across the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, millions of Brazilian fans are watching. Most of them aren't tuning into a television network to do it. They're watching a YouTuber.
His name is Casimiro Miguel. He dropped out of journalism school and built CazéTV into the platform now streaming all 104 World Cup matches to Brazil. On June 13, his broadcast of Brazil vs. Morocco pulled 12.2 million simultaneous viewers, the largest live audience in YouTube's history. It beat a moon landing.
For a country where watching soccer meant watching Globo for decades, this is a real shift in who holds the power. It's also the subject of our latest case study, reported by Ana Clara Otoni, a Brazilian-American journalist who spent months tracing how a Twitch reaction streamer ended up out-negotiating conglomerates for the biggest event in sports.
How He Got Here
Before he was landing rights deals, Casimiro was just watching things on camera: games, reality shows, cooking competitions, whatever his audience wanted to react to alongside him. That habit, as small as it sounds, built the one thing traditional broadcasters spend fortunes chasing and rarely get, which is trust.
The turning point came in 2021, when a Brazilian law let clubs sell their own streaming rights and cracked open a market Globo had locked down for a generation. Casimiro moved into the gap, backed by LiveMode, a sports-rights firm founded by the same people who built the network where he got his start. By the 2022 World Cup, CazéTV was pulling audiences big enough that Globo launched its own YouTube channel just to compete.
Today the channel has 32.5 million YouTube subscribers. It mixes real institutional access with humor and live-chat chaos, and it's since taken LaLiga rights away from Disney in Brazil and signed more World Cup sponsors than Globo did.
The STEPP Read
There's a bigger reason this case matters than one guy beating a network.
The P in STEPP, Platform-Native, has never been about a newsroom learning to make TikToks. It's about recognizing that some people already understand a platform's culture in ways an institution never will, and treating that knowledge as something worth partnering with. Casimiro's format already belonged on YouTube: unscripted, communal, built for people to talk back, which is exactly why it worked when a broadcast-style show in the same slot wouldn't have. LiveMode found he was reaching a digital-first audience of 18-to-34-year-olds who weren't turning on the TV at all.
The case gets more interesting where Ana pushes past the win, into the territory the E for Engagement and the S for Standards are built to test. When CazéTV's live chat filled with misogynistic abuse during the 2023 Women's World Cup, YouTube's tools couldn't keep up and the team had to shut the chat down. When Casimiro sells a betting coupon live to millions of young viewers, he's the journalist, the host, and the advertiser all at once, with none of the wall between editorial and advertising that broadcast TV is held to. In a country where sports betting has become a leading driver of household debt, that matters.
The lesson for any newsroom eyeing a creator partnership comes down to this: platform-native reach and platform-native ethics are two different things, and the second one doesn't come bundled with the first. As one researcher put it to us, you can't reach that scale alone, and reaching it carries a minimum expectation. You owe something to the audience you're now reaching.
It's an 8-minute read and the most complete English-language account of the CazéTV story we've come across. If you work anywhere near sports, video, or audience strategy, go read it.
Worth Your Time
📺 The World Cup has quietly become the biggest creator-journalism experiment ever run. YouTube is an official FIFA "preferred platform" for the tournament, and it's put 24 global creators with a combined 350M+ subscribers on the ground, plus a first-ever YouTube FIFA Creator Cup streaming from New York on July 12. Worth watching how the creator coverage stacks up against traditional broadcast, because that gap is the whole story.
📊 Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report landed, built on nearly 100,000 interviews across 48 markets, and the findings are blunt. More than half of 18-to-24-year-olds now say social media, video, or AI chatbots are their main source of news. Trust in news has fallen to its lowest point in a decade. The creator layer sitting between platforms and audiences is no longer a side story.
🤖 Adobe's 2026 Creators' Toolkit Reportsurveyed more than 16,000 creators. 87% who use creative AI say it's grown their business, but 81% still say human judgment is what makes the work distinctive. That tracks with STEPP's Standards pillar. AI drops the cost of making content and raises the value of voice, taste, and accountability. Fast to draft is not the same as ready to publish.
Adriana Lacy is the founder and CEO of Field Nine Group, where she leads Influencer Journalism and developed the STEPP Framework for ethical newsroom-creator partnerships. Previously, she worked at The New York Times, LA Times, and Axios.
