For more than half a century, Brazil’s TV Globo was the undisputed home of soccer in a nation obsessed with it. That dominance is now being tested by Casimiro Miguel, known as “Cazé” — a 32-year-old journalism school dropout who has built a massive online following and shaken up the Brazilian sports broadcasting landscape.
Powered by features like live chat and extended pre- and post-game analysis, CazéTV has accomplished what traditional television networks dream of: pulling in new viewers and keeping them engaged for hours. FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, describes CazéTV “the top digital sports platform in Brazil” and calls it “central to its content strategy.”
That growth has come with controversy and accusations of misogyny and a lack of diversity. Brazilian regulators are investigating suspected predatory advertising practices by CazéTV.
Still, Nicolas Duprat, a Brazilian sports media researcher who has studied CazéTV for years, credits the channel with helping democratize access for fans who can’t afford stadium tickets or a TV Globo subscription.
“The fan who can no longer afford a seat, where does he watch? At home,” Duprat said. “Someone had to reach him there.” Last year, TV Globo launched a YouTube sports channel of its own.
“The fan who can no longer afford a seat, where does he watch? At home. Someone had to reach him there.”
— Nicolas Duprat, Brazilian sports media researcher
In 2020, when Cazé was working as a sports journalist at the Brazilian television network SBT, he took up a side hustle: livestreaming on Twitch. During soccer’s off-season, Cazé began reacting to other programs on his livestreams. His charisma and humor quickly drew audiences, and by the end of the year, he had more than a million Twitch followers. The side income turned out to be a lifeline: when the pandemic hit and both of his parents lost their jobs, Cazé stepped in to support the family, eventually earning enough to allow his parents to retire. His father was skeptical at first, baffled that his son barely ever left his room, yet was making serious money. At one point he asked his son: “Is the money you’re making [legal]?” Cazé recalled in an interview with Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres.
LiveMode, FIFA’s commercial arm in Latin America, took notice. A 2021 law allowed Brazilian soccer clubs to sell their own streaming rights. LiveMode’s founders, Edgar Diniz and Sérgio Lopes, orchestrated a deal for the Brazilian soccer club Atlético Paranaense to sell rights to Cazé. He streamed the games on Twitch behind a paywall, and the model took off.
The following year, FIFA considered launching its own streaming service, FIFA Plus. LiveMode thought it was a bad idea. “We told them the chance of it going wrong was 100%,” Diniz told Globo Esporte.
Instead, LiveMode proposed that FIFA stream its men’s World Cup free — on Cazé’s YouTube channel. At the time, they considered using a Youtube channel where Cazé shared clips of his Twitch streams, but ultimately decided to create a new channel. That’s how CazéTV was born — and how the young upstart broke a decades-old soccer broadcast monopoly once held by TV Globo.
“Man, it seemed really bizarre,” Cazé said on the YouTube channel Expresso 1923 last year. “You’re there doing little games here and there, and now you’re going to broadcast the World Cup. What the hell?”
Cazé, his agency, LiveMode, and FIFA did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Today, CazéTV has more than 41 million subscribers. In June, it livestreamed all 104 matches of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. More than 24 million people tuned in to the semifinal match between France and Spain — a YouTube record.
“We thought all Brazilians watch the World Cup [on television], but that was not true,” Lopes told the news site Sports Pro in 2024. It turned out that plenty of people, especially those between the ages of 18 and 34, were opening social media and YouTube instead of turning on the TV. “And we got these guys to connect and watch the World Cup,” Lopes said.
LiveMode grew in tandem with CazéTV, acquiring it completely in 2025 and making Cazé a partner. Its investors include the private equity firm General Atlantic and Portuguese soccer icon Cristiano Ronaldo.
CazéTV now holds Brazilian rights to LaLiga, Spain’s top soccer league, and airs a weekly Premier League match through a deal with ESPN — competitions previously locked behind paywalls. And it has moved beyond soccer: CazéTV’s coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics brought sports like curling and skiing to Brazilian screens for the first time.
I previously explored the rise of CazéTV in an investigation for the site Influencer Journalism [run by Adriana Lacy, who also works with The Nieman Foundation]. And I discovered that Cazé’s fans don’t just passively consume media. They also take action in ways that influence what goes viral online — for instance, in the 2026 World Cup, turning a little-known player into a global superstar overnight. The goalkeeper for the tiny nation of Cape Verde — Josimar José Évora Dias, known as “Vozinha” — had just 46,000 Instagram followers before he pulled off a stunning 0-0 tie against the powerhouse team Spain. Following the shocking upset, Cazé asked his viewers to follow Vozinha on social media. Within 24 hours, the once-obscure goalie had nearly 10 million followers, and now has nearly 30 million. That’s more than American athletes like Olympic gymnast Simone Biles or football player (and Taylor Swift’s new husband) Travis Kelce.
Cazé’s audience influence has also translated into commercial power. In its early days, CazéTV pulled in over $160,000 in a single month from YouTube views, and was backed by sponsors like Unilever and McDonald’s. In 2023, it became the first channel to stream the FIFA Women’s World Cup for free in Brazil. And by this year, it had secured 11 sponsors, while TV Globo had four.
Brazilian soccer fan Gabriela Nunes, 33, says she relies on CazéTV to watch matches she can’t find anywhere else. Even so, she says the channel’s more relaxed commentary-heavy format isn’t for everyone. Her 65-year-old mother tried watching a World Cup match on CazéTV, Gabriela said, but complained there was “too much yelling.”
Cazé has responded to criticisms over accessibility, but seems to see them primarily as technical issues. “It kills me to read people saying, ‘My grandfather tried to watch CazéTV and couldn’t figure it out,” he has said in an interview to channel Expresso 1923.“That’s terrible. That’s really bad.”
Some argue that CazéTV’s growing reach and influence should be accompanied by an increasing level of accountability. The channel hasn’t always complied with the kinds of regulations followed by traditional broadcasters. For example, when broadcast TV shows a viewer comment, often in the form of a tweet, it’s highlighted with the understanding that soccer is a family sport, so anything with swearing or violent language does not make the cut. On CazéTV, screen comments are curated too, but watching the live chat is part of the experience itself. Millions see the feed of comments unfiltered in real time. The raw chat can be seen as being tacitly endorsed by the channel, and as a reflection of its culture and values.
During the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup coverage, for example, viewers flooded the live chat with comments mocking the players and accusing Cazé of “performative wokeness.” CazéTV disabled the chat mid-match, and issued a statement condemning the comments as “unacceptable prejudice.” They promised to have more moderators for future broadcasts.
But issues around the culture of the program went beyond the chat. During the 2025 Club World Cup, Cazé joked on air about comparing his anatomy to that of a Brazilian adult film star. He never apologized. “When the man who gives his name to CazéTV thinks it’s reasonable to make that joke, the future of TV is going to be equally sexist and misogynistic,” journalist Milly Lacombe said on Instagram.
One of the financial backers of the channel has sparked another layer of controversy. CazéTV accepts gambling ads. Traditional television channels in Brazil are required to keep ads separate from their reporting and commentary. But Cazé pitches and sells betting coupons directly to his millions of young viewers, acting as journalist, show host, and advertiser all at once.
Media watchers say that combination of roles is potentially dangerous and has gone largely unchallenged, even as sports betting has become a leading cause of household debt in Brazil. “There are betting companies everywhere,” Cazé has said in response to criticism of his practices. “There’s not much you can do about it. That’s what keeps the business running.”
But during the 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup, lawmakers complained, and Brazilian consumer protection agency Senacon opened an investigation into whether CazéTV’s betting ads were misleading or abusive. In response, the company released a statement saying it would “adopt a more specific and conservative standard for betting activations.” Commentators stopped discussing live odds, and betting-related language has been moved to commercial breaks.
In 2027, Brazil will host the FIFA Women’s World Cup for the first time. CazéTV has been chosen, along with Globo, to stream all 64 matches live and free on digital broadcast platforms. This next challenge won’t be measured solely by audience reach — CazéTV has already proven it can rival Globo’s — but by whether it can continue to innovate on the cultural front, and match its programming ambitions to the standards its own audience has come to expect.
As Brazilian politician Tabata Amaral said in a social media message to Cazé: “Maybe you think it’s unfair that comments are directed at you when all the big media, Globo, SBT, are doing the same thing,” she said, adding, “I’m sorry, but the fault is yours. You taught us to expect more from you.”
