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Gary Neville’s sports media group has acquired two YouTube channels owned by one of the UK’s most popular but controversial football content creators in a deal understood to be worth a seven-figure sum.
Mark Goldbridge’s The United Stand and That’s Football YouTube channels bring a combined 3.7 million subscribers to The Overlap, Neville’s group, which is understood to be seeking to grow its specialist coverage of big clubs across Europe.
Neville’s purchase may raise some eyebrows: the former Manchester United defender and Goldbridge, whose sometimes negative, explosive outbursts about Manchester United seem to attract criticism and subscribers equally, may appear unlikely bedfellows.
Neville admits he criticised “those bloody YouTubers” before he became one. Once asked if he would invite Goldbridge, whose real name is Brent Di Cesare, on to The Overlap, “I think I said ‘no”, on Twitter [now X]. Someone will probably find that.
“And he’s criticised me, quite heavily, in the last few years for my opinions on Manchester United. To be fair, we don’t hold grudges between us. We don’t take ourselves too seriously,” he said.
The deal seeks to capitalise on the scale of appetite for punditry and reaction to football matches outside of live coverage. Neville, the Overlap co-chair and former Manchester United defender, said that the goal was a group that “gives fans direct, personality-led content.”
While live football was still “the best moment of the week” he said, the space The Overlap aimed for is “the noise segment”: “The constant noise that sits around football when there’s no football on … fans still want to hear about what’s happening with their team. They still want the opinion, the debate, the conversation. That’s the world that we’re in.”
“The United Stand and That’s Football are two of the best-known football channels on YouTube, and our intention is to develop them into the most compelling Manchester United and football news channels in the market.”
The United Stand, with 2.26 million subscribers, is the biggest Manchester United fan channel on YouTube while That’s Football, with 1.46 million subscribers, covers the Premier League and beyond.
Under the deal, The United Stand will launch new formats, including Stick to United, featuring former players and journalists, and The Daily United, a daily Manchester United news show.
Plans for That’s Football, which will be relaunched and rebranded, include a daily football news and podcast channel.
The Overlap, which Neville co-founded in 2021, includes Stick to Football, in which Neville and fellow pundits Jamie Carragher, Jill Scott, Roy Keane and Ian Wright are often joined by guests, and Fan Debate with Wayne Rooney and Paul Scholes. Last year it launched Stick to Cricket, with Alastair Cook, Michael Vaughan, David Lloyd and Phil Tufnell.
It is its first acquisition since Global, one of Europe’s biggest commercial radio companies, which owns LBC and podcasts including The News Agents, took a majority stake in January in the latest sign of YouTube’s influence in sports broadcasting.
Neville said it was the “first acquisition of hopefully a few more” as it sought to “build brilliant channels for big clubs in this country and around Europe”.
He said: “With The United Stand we’d like to bring two or three different formats and pieces of content into the world of Mark that sit alongside what he currently does, using ex-football players and journalists talking about United.” With That’s Football, the plan is to create a new daily podcast football news channel, he said.
They were “not going to put anything into Mark’s channel that he or his audience don’t like” but would add “value and intelligence” with ex-footballers and journalists.
It was the sacking of Manchester United’s head coach Ruben Amorim in January that impressed on Neville the need for daily content. “I recognised, we didn’t have a programme on our channel for about eight days.”
It means The Overlap will have about 6 million subscribers across its channels, not counting audio, as it aims for television-standard production quality.
Goldbridge said: “I’ve spent the last 10 years building The United Stand for Manchester United fans and That’s Football for all fans, and I’m prouder of that than anything I’ve ever done. This deal is about what comes next. The Overlap has the ambition, the credibility and the resources to help me take what I do to the next level.”
