By: Hee-Dee Walenga
Darren Jason Watkins Jr, better known as iShowSpeed, is a 20-year-old American internet streamer from Cincinnati, Ohio, who has taken the world by storm with his high energy & unpredictable YouTube live streams.
Watkins Jr began streaming on YouTube in 2017 with simple video game content with few viewers. Today, Watkins Jr has 48 million YouTube subscribers, 45 million followers on TikTok, 43 million on Instagram, 3.8 million on X, 2.8 million on twitch, and has generated billions of online impressions and views.
He is currently on a 28-day 20-country tour of Africa that has sparked excitement among internet users all over the world. At the time of writing, Watkins Jr has visited Angola, South Africa, Eswatini, Botswana, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Kenya, and Ethiopia.
He has gone live 12 times so far on the tour, averaging 3.8 million viewers per stream. One of the 2 streams he did in Kenya amassed 9.4 million views in a little over 24 hours. Watkins Jr started his Africa tour in Angola with 46.9 million subscribers on 29 December 2025. Two weeks later, his subscriber number shot up by 1.6 million subscribers.
Exactly how did the 20-year-old achieve this? The answer, in large part, is due to the power of the world’s biggest sport, football. In early 2021, one of Watkins Jr’s viewers sent him a U$2 dollar donation along with the question: “What soccer team do you support?” Watkins Jr responded with, “Cristiano Ronaldo, Siiiuuu!” The clip of his answer went ultra viral and he has never looked back since.
iShowSpeed’s proclamation of his love for Ronaldo introduced him to football lovers all around the world. Watkins Jr had 100,000 subscribers in April 2021. By June, he surpassed the 1 million mark.
Watkins Jr is a modern example of how sport is one of the best agents of socialisation available today. Socialisation is the process by which people become familiar with and adapt themselves to the interpersonal relationships of their social world. Through socialisation, people develop ideas about themselves and those with whom they interact.
The sport of football provided a gateway for iShowSpeed to turn his social world into one that consists of more than 300 million people from all over the world. It is not a coincidence that whenever he travels to a country to do a livestream, he is wearing the national football jersey of that country. Watkins Jr is fully aware that football is the main foundation of the connection he has built with the world.
Under normal circumstances, a 20-year-old from Cincinnati, Ohio and a 20-year-old from Kigali, Rwanda would have very little in common. However, once the pair establish that they both have a love for a sport, all barriers, including language, are immediately broken and socialisation can begin. This process has been repeated hundreds, if not thousands, of times on Watkins Jr’s livestreams.
Globalisation is another key element to Watkins Jr’s rise. Globalisation can be defined as the growing interdependence of the world’s economies, cultures, and populations, brought about by cross-border trade in goods and services, technology, and flows of investment, people, and information. The sporting industry, particularly the sport of football, has globalisation to thank for turning it into a multi-billion dollar industry. I don’t speak a lick of Mandarin, but I can almost guarantee that if I walked the streets of China asking where I could buy a Real Madrid shirt, the locals would immediately be able to point me in the right direction.
Today, I can instantaneously trade information with someone living on the other side of the world because of the internet. Watkins Jr does this daily, for hours, in front of millions of people all over the world. Watkins Jr’s ability to seemlessly integrate himself in any society in the world has been inspiring to witness in real time.
Through his streams, Watkins Jr has immersed himself in the diversity of the world and simultaneously educated his viewers about what the world has to offer outside of what they are accustomed to in their everyday lives.
Although Namibia was part of the 20-country list, aviation regulatory hiccups have prevented him from streaming in Namibia. With the tour reaching its conclusion soon, it remains to be seen if he will stream from Namibia.
