The Sidemen Charity Match prize draw: how a creator audience turns a sold-out event into a £5 entry

BBC Children in Need ran a paid-entry prize draw inside the Sidemen's 2025 Wembley match. The event raised £4.7m across many mechanics; the draw was one of them, and what it teaches is about owned audience and scarce access, not a draw-specific number.

Year
2025
Platform
BBC Children in Need (own platform)
Entry price
£5

An independent breakdown by The Prize Draw Company. We did not run this draw. We studied it.

The Sidemen Charity Match 2025 raised £4,733,004 for BBC Children in Need, the Sidemen's own Bright Side and M7 Education, a total the Sidemen themselves announced as over £4.7 million for charity. By the event's own and press accounts it sold out Wembley in three hours, drew 90,000 people through the gates and over 8 million live viewers online, and nearly doubled the previous match. It is one of the clearest influencer-fundraising stories in the country.

It is also a story you can easily tell wrong. The £4.7m was raised across many mechanics at once: 90,000 ticket sales, livestream donations, merchandise and a prize draw. The prize draw was one of them. What the draw raised on its own is not published, and you cannot read it off the headline. So this case is not "a prize draw raised £4.7m". It is something more useful: a clean look at why a prize draw is the natural mechanic when a creator owns both a huge engaged audience and a scarce thing that audience wants.

The scarce thing here was access. The match sold out in three hours, so a ticket plus a behind-the-scenes Wembley experience was something money could no longer simply buy. BBC Children in Need and Bright Side turned that scarcity into a £5 entry, open to anyone who missed out on a seat.

At a glance

The facts below are split deliberately. The first block is the EVENT. The second is the DRAW. Keeping them apart is the whole discipline of this case. Event figures are as announced by the Sidemen and reported in press coverage of the match; draw details are from BBC Children in Need's own prize draw pages.

The event

  • Total raised: £4,733,004 (about £4.7m), across all mechanics, announced by the Sidemen as over £4.7 million for charity
  • Beneficiary split: BBC Children in Need 50%, Bright Side 43%, M7 Education 7%
  • Date and venue: Saturday 8 March 2025, Wembley Stadium
  • Attendance: 90,000, sold out in three hours
  • Live stream: over 8 million viewers
  • Context: nearly doubled the previous match (2023, over £2.4m); no match was held in 2024

The prize draw (the mechanic this case is about)

  • Mechanic: paid-entry prize draw, £5 to enter online, free by post
  • Prizes: 50 packages in three tiers (1 Gold, 4 Silver, 45 Bronze)
  • Prize content: a pair of Category 1 tickets plus experiences (Wembley tour, players' tunnel access, post-match hospitality, merchandise, a Side+ subscription)
  • Promoter: BBC Children in Need with Bright Side; prizes provided by Nemedis Ltd and Arcade Media Ltd
  • Ran: closed 15 December 2024 (online), winners drawn from 23 December 2024
  • Amount the draw raised: not in the public record
  • Number of entrants: not in the public record

What the draw was

This was a paid-entry prize draw, not a lottery and not a "free draw". You entered by donating £5 to BBC Children in Need, or for free by post, as set out on the charity's own entry page. The free postal route is there for one reason: it keeps the draw legal without a society lottery licence. The product people actually bought was the £5 ticket to a chance.

What they had a chance at was access, tiered to spread the win. One Gold winner took the full package: a pair of Category 1 seats, a behind-the-scenes Wembley tour, players' tunnel access, post-match hospitality, a shirt, a fan pack and a Side+ subscription. Four Silver winners and forty-five Bronze winners took lighter versions of the same idea. Fifty winners in all, which matters: every winner is a real person posting about it, and fifty of them is fifty pieces of social proof, not one.

The prizes cost the charities very little to assemble. The tickets and hospitality came from Nemedis Ltd, the merchandise and subscriptions from Arcade Media Ltd, and the Wembley tour from the event itself. The draw was selling access to something the organisers already controlled, which is what makes the margin on this kind of draw so strong.

The audience, which is the actual engine

The reason this draw could exist is the audience behind it. The Sidemen are YouTubers. Their match was not a venue hire with a marketing budget bolted on; it was a sold-out event built directly on an owned digital following, 90,000 in the stadium and over 8 million watching live. When ticket demand outstrips a 90,000 seat stadium in three hours, you have manufactured exactly the scarcity a prize draw feeds on: a very large warm audience and a prize they wanted but mostly could not get.

That is the honest core of the case. The draw worked because it sat inside owned attention and offered scarce access. Both halves came from the creators. A charity that partners with that kind of audience owner inherits the same two ingredients. A charity without them does not get the result by copying the format.

The timing, which is quietly clever

The draw closed in December 2024, three months before the March 2025 match. That places it inside BBC Children in Need's November appeal, when the charity's attention and reach are at their annual peak, while the prize was a future event the winners would wait for. Selling a chance at a spring experience during the winter appeal let one audience moment do the fundraising and a second, later moment deliver the reward. It is a small structural choice worth noticing.

What charity teams should take from this

  1. A prize draw is the natural way to monetise owned attention plus scarce access. If you control an audience and an experience that audience cannot easily buy, a low-priced draw converts attention into income better than an appeal alone. The Sidemen had both in extreme form. The mechanic is the transferable part; the scale is not.

  2. Separate the event total from the mechanic, always. The £4.7m belongs to the whole event, not the draw. When you report a draw that lived inside a bigger campaign, never borrow the campaign's headline for it. Doing so is both dishonest and a missed chance to learn what the draw alone actually did.

  3. Tier the prizes to multiply the winners, and sell the chance, not the postage. Fifty winners across Gold, Silver and Bronze is fifty advocates and a spread of entry appeal. And the product is the £5 chance: treat the free postal route as the legal mechanism it is, never as the marketing message.

What this case study doesn't claim

The single thing to hold onto: £4.7m is the event, not the draw. It was raised across ticket sales, livestream donations, merchandise and the prize draw together, and the amount attributable to the draw alone is not in the public record. We do not estimate it, because any estimate would be invented. By the same token, the number of entrants and the real odds are not public, so we make no claim about them. The lesson here is the mechanic and the audience that powered it, not a draw figure we cannot isolate.

Sources

  1. Verge Magazine, "The Sidemen Charity Match raises over £4million for charity". https://vergemagazine.co.uk/the-sidemen-charity-match-raises-over-4million-for-charity/ . Verified 2026-06-11. Press; event total, attendance, stream, previous-match comparison. (States the date as 12 March; corrected to 8 March against Wikipedia and the BBC Children in Need draw pages.)
  2. Wikipedia, "Sidemen Charity Match". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidemen_Charity_Match . Verified 2026-06-11. Precise total (£4,733,004), beneficiary split, date, attendance, 2024 not held.
  3. Sidemen (official), announcement that the 2025 match raised over £4.7 million for charity. https://www.facebook.com/sidemenofficial/posts/did-you-know-that-the-2025-sidemen-charity-match-raised-over-47-million-for-char/1340734207837457/ . Verified 2026-06-12. Operator corroboration of the event total.
  4. BBC Children in Need, Charity Match Prize Draw description. https://www.bbcchildreninneed.co.uk/children-in-need/charity-match-prize-draw-description/ . Verified 2026-06-11. Primary operator source for prize tiers, contents and providers.
  5. BBC Children in Need, Charity Match Prize Draw entry page. https://www.bbcchildreninneed.co.uk/children-in-need/prize-draw/ . Verified 2026-06-11. Primary source for entry price, free postal route and dates.
  6. Tubefilter, "Sidemen raise £2.4 million ... 2023 charity match". https://www.tubefilter.com/2023/09/11/sidemen-football-soccer-2023-charity-match-results-millions-raised-viewers/ . Verified 2026-06-11. Prior-match figure for the comparison.

Full evidence base, with verbatim quotes and confidence grades: factsheet.md

Questions this case answers

How much did the Sidemen Charity Match 2025 raise?

The 2025 match raised £4,733,004 (about £4.7m), a total the Sidemen announced as over £4.7 million for charity, split between BBC Children in Need (50%), the Sidemen's Bright Side (43%) and M7 Education (7%). That is the whole-event total, raised across ticket sales, livestream donations, merchandise and the BBC Children in Need prize draw. It is not the figure the prize draw raised on its own.

How much did the prize draw itself raise?

That figure is not in the public record. The draw was one mechanic embedded inside the event, and BBC Children in Need has not published a draw-specific total or entrant count. Any number presented as the draw's raise would be invented, so we do not present one.

What was the prize draw and how did you enter?

It was a paid-entry prize draw run by BBC Children in Need with the Sidemen's Bright Side. You entered by donating £5 online, or for free by post. There were 50 prizes in three tiers (1 Gold, 4 Silver, 45 Bronze), each a package of tickets plus match-day experiences at the sold-out Wembley game.

Was it a free-entry prize draw?

No. It was a paid-entry draw: the product was a £5 donation for a chance to win. The free postal route exists so the draw stays legal without a lottery licence. The free option is compliance plumbing, not the point of the offer.

When did the draw run, given the match was in March 2025?

The draw closed on 15 December 2024 (online) and 22 December 2024 (post), with winners drawn from 23 December 2024. It ran during BBC Children in Need's November appeal window. The prizes were then redeemed at the match on 8 March 2025.

Can a smaller charity copy this?

The mechanic, yes: a prize draw is a sensible way to convert a warm audience into income when you control a scarce experience people want. The result, no. The Sidemen brought roughly 90,000 sold-out seats and over 8 million live viewers. That owned audience is the engine, and it is not transferable.