Football's YouTube highlights revolution
YouTube is opening doors for football fandom like nothing before
It’s always been my understanding that there’s a sort of social contract that we agree to when we get involved in non-league football.
Sure, there are aggressive oddballs here and there, and the occasional over-exuberant newcomer who doesn’t seem to have got the memo, but by and large we’ve all signed up to a simple pact: our little clubs (a) are basically alike and (b) can’t afford to be embarrassed or disgraced by the actions of their own.
The most awful football fans are supposed to be the ones on Twitter bickering over red-shirted teams they’ve never seen in the flesh.
Or so I thought. My team was promoted in 2022/23. This season has been an arseholes’ gallery of some of the worst people I’ve ever encountered in football.
There are plenty of things to love about non-league. An absence of scummy, pissed-up, abusive, backwater cokeheads is not one of them.
In gooder people news, Ian King and Sam Whyte have published their first episode of The Monday Kickback, a new podcast from Unexpected Delirium. Lovely jubbly.
Football's YouTube highlights revolution
Football isn’t a television show. When the game contorts itself around the wishes of its broadcasters, the response from supporters of a more traditional bent is that those wishes should be secondary to the in-person experience.
Spending every Saturday at the football is a lifestyle choice that comes with the expectation of being part of something. To one degree or another, support constitutes participation. That should always be the priority when any decision is made.
But football is played on the screen as well as the pitch. Most people who watch it on their televisions, phones, tablets and computer screens don’t go to matches, but almost everyone who does attend matches regularly will also watch them remotely.
Far away from the more commonly acknowledged influence of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok on football tittle-tattle, YouTube is fundamentally changing what it means to be a football consumer online.
YouTube has an estimated value of $400 billion. More than a billion hours of video is watched on it every day. It’s the world’s second largest search engine as well as the second most used social media platform. It’s kind of a big deal, to put it mildly.
Despite all this, football was slow to figure out how to twist YouTube’s clout in its favour. In 2024, nearly two decades after the site hit ye olde world wide web, the power of YouTube is finally understood by football clubs, leagues and rights holders. The effect of that on the evolution of football supporter culture is more significant than people realise.
Sport is in its streaming age. Sky, TNT and the BBC all provide web and mobile apps on which live events can be viewed. DAZN is an example of a streaming-first broadcaster, modelled as the Netflix of sport long before it ever went live.
YouTube is in the game too. Its live feature is baked into channels; any channel with 50 subscribers or more – if it’s owned by an adult – can stream live.
Football matches legally being shown live on YouTube isn’t new, exactly, but it is becoming more familiar. For several years, the UEFA Champions League final and Europa League final were broadcast on YouTube for UK viewers as part of BT Sport’s rights package.
Using YouTube as the underlying platform for free-to-air showcases is an established play for broadcasters but it has a more overt impact on supporter culture when it plugs a different sort of gap altogether.
Take Japan’s J.League. Every weekend, the J.League International YouTube channel streams a couple of J1 matches, making them available anywhere in the world where the league is without a foreign television deal. Even with this season’s offering sliced in half from four matches per week in 2023, that’s a level of access nobody could have imagined just a few years ago.
Getting up early on a Saturday morning to fire up the YouTube app and watch Kyoto Sanga versus Hokkaido Consadole Sapporo is undeniably a niche exercise but it is indicative of what YouTube can do for certain categories of football lover.
But the real boon for the true football glutton? Match highlights videos.
It’s been possible to scratch around in the digital dirt for football highlights for years, but highlights packages on YouTube are now legal, organised and consistent.
It’s becoming a more satisfactory way to consume football with each passing year but it’s taken some time to catch up with other sports in terms of getting over itself and realising that all eyeballs are good eyeballs. Showing a few minutes of highlights doesn’t make a dent in attendances or television audiences.
North America’s National Football League and National Hockey League are among the sports leagues that have been posting highlights for free for so long it’s hard to remember a time before they did it. Both the NHL and NFL are set up differently than football, of course, and indeed have their own paid-for live streaming arrangements with associated highlights offerings. On YouTube they’re anybody’s games come rain or shine.
Football has finally joined the party. The posting of complete, reliable and legal highlights videos seems to have accelerated in 2023 and 2024. It’s now possible to pick a league and watch the lot, from the start of a season to the end, and never miss a beat. Previously, games would be skipped or whole match weeks apparently forgotten and channels abandoned, as if the idea of a supporter taking in everything hadn’t been considered.
It has now. There are leagues all over the world that can be followed through YouTube highlights packages and playlists as if they’re there intentionally for that purpose.
The aforementioned J.League does a tremendous job, uploading highlights of every fixture in both J1 and J2. Major League Soccer – wonky editing aside – does the same, as does the USL Championship. In Australia, the A-League men’s and women’s top flights are both served by official highlights on YouTube.
These are leagues on the other side of the world that can be consumed with ease in Europe. The continent’s own leading leagues are doing the same. Serie A and La Liga publish highlights on their official channels. Highlights of every game in Germany’s Bundesliga and England’s Premier League are posted through Sky Sports.
That route is particularly interesting. In the case of the Premier League, Sky Sports’ sharing of match highlights is more of a threat to traditional media – not least Match of the Day, BBC Sport’s long-standing Saturday evening highlights programme – than their availability on Sky’s own app or website ever was.
But Sky Sports itself is the most prominent broadcast partner of the Premier League and their participation here is a reaction, an adaptation, to disruption in the model they’ve enjoyed and thrived upon since the early nineties. They are, in short, giving the people what they want.
Yes, these are good times to be a football nut. The quality of YouTube highlights is excellent, give or take, and their use of the world feed in many cases means that it’s possible to watch them with English language commentary too. Football nerds couldn’t ask for more.
The potential effect on football culture and fandom is seismic. This is football without borders: open access to every match in loads of leagues all over the planet.
It represents a throwing open of the doors quite unlike the normal behaviours of an industry more used to shutting access down. It’s not about generosity. Football sees the value in owning the legal version of itself, not to mention the threats posed to its business by illegal alternatives.
Official highlights on YouTube engender new habits and routines of fandom, potentially crucial at a time when the next generation is being priced out of the game. They present an opportunity, eventually, to connect with other supporters and other football cultures. Who knows where that might lead the curious?
There’s a slight advantage for English-speaking leagues if the aim is to convert highlights grazing into long-term overseas support. It’s easier for an English speaker to follow all the fluff and ephemera around DC United and Wellington Phoenix than Kawasaki Frontale and Velez Sarsfield, but the potency is in the quality and sheer volume of choice available. Pick ‘n’ mix football is here.
Throw streamed matches back into the conversation and it’s easy to make a case for football clubs and leagues to speak seriously with their broadcast partners about YouTube.
The upside is exciting and comes with the added bonus of tackling a significant percentage of piracy. If they have no broadcasters in some places, YouTube itself might be the direct answer.
Football highlights on YouTube could prove to be the most significant shift in mainstream consumption of football since the dawn of the dodgy box. And we all know someone with one of those, don’t we?
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“When I think how quickly Rob’s developed to work at this level, and deal with the demands of the Premier League, it’s amazing. Two years ago we were in League Two. And he looks like he’s been doing this 10 years already.”
Richie Kyle, Rob Edwards’ assistant manager at Luton Town, on the Hatters boss adapting to the Premier League. I agree.
Salty beef extracts
The Midlife Crisis of Cristiano Ronaldo (Unexpected Delirium)
Hillsborough: How Liverpool and Nottingham Forest fans found common ground in tragedy (BBC Sport)
Semi-automated offside technology explained, and how it will impact Premier League (i)
Rachel Daly retires from England as the most underrated Lioness of a generation (i)
Rotherham were run sensibly in a climate of waste – it led to a season from hell (i)
Nestory Irankunda having agency over his future is a good thing for Australian football (The Guardian)
Fight! Yokohama! (Terrace Edition)
Collective effervescence (Why Are You Like This?)
Dessert
This beauty is the Nike Tiempo Legend X Emerald, a synthetic leather football boot which prides itself on being less water-retentive, which is an insult I plan to use frequently from this day forward.
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