Mark Goldbridge’s Bundesliga bow a symbol of TV’s want to attract future audiences

And so, as he prepared to broadcast the opening game of the Bundesliga season – Bayern Munich’s 6-0 rout of RB Leipzig – to his 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube, Goldbridge tacitly admitted he was not sure who Leipzig’s captain was, acknowledged he had been made to “look a right fool” after failing to read the teamsheet correctly, and expressed delight that he managed to cut to Munich at the right time.

“They’re good graphics,” he said, as the live feed showed gigantic cut-outs of the line-ups, projected onto the field at the Allianz Arena in the style of video game icons. “They’re on the pitch. But they’re not actually on the pitch.”

All of this, of course, is precisely the sort of stuff that is lapped up by Goldbridge’s sizeable army of detractors. He built his fame, largely, on the back of viral clips of his cartoonish reactions while watching Manchester United lurch from one humiliation to the next. A decent proportion of his audience are, in effect, rubber-neckers.

Like Lorraine Kelly, though, Goldbridge is best thought of as a character. (Unlike Lorraine Kelly, the actor and the role are not eponymous: the 46-year-old’s real name is Brent Di Cesare.) His sentiments might be sincere, but his delivery – in a nasal, high-pitched voice that owes much to Alan Partridge – is knowing. Goldbridge might play a fool on screen. Off it, he is anything but.

The deal he has signed with the Bundesliga is a case in point. Alongside The Overlap, part-owned by Gary Neville, and the BBC, Goldbridge’s That’s Football channel will broadcast the Bundesliga’s Friday night fixture to British audiences this season. Saturday night games will remain on Sky; everything else is available on pay-per-view through Amazon.

It is not, in truth, quite the “groundbreaking” moment for “fan content creation” Goldbridge suggested it was as he waited for Bayern to kick off last week. Ibai Llanos, a Spanish streamer, broadcast the Copa América on his Twitch channel in 2021, in partnership with Kosmos, a company founded by the former Barcelona defender Gerard Piqué. CazéTV, a Brazilian YouTube channel, had the rights to 22 games at the 2022 World Cup; it has subsequently done a deal to show every single match in the 2026 edition.

CazéTV is one of the Bundesliga’s broadcast partners in Brazil, too; last season, the creator Cris Devil Gamer streamed Germany’s blue-riband fixture, the meeting of Bayern and Borussia Dortmund, in Vietnam. More recently, more locally, Goalhanger – the all-conquering podcast studio part-owned by Gary Lineker – signed highlights deals with Fifa for the Club World Cup and La Liga for the Spanish top flight.

All of those arrangements have been presented, by the leagues and governing bodies involved, as evidence of how forward-thinking they are, how young and dynamic and open-minded. There is some truth in that. Football has long been obsessed with reaching younger audiences. Its motives, though, are not limited to mere evangelising.

All elite leagues are, at heart, TV businesses. They rely on money from rights holders to sign players and pay wages and keep the show rolling. But the cost of those subscriptions is now so high that they often preclude younger fans. Within the game, there has long been an awareness that the next generation of subscribers is starting to dwindle.

By partnering with streaming services like YouTube and Twitch, the leagues are sacrificing a little money now in order to build an audience in the future. The losses are not especially significant. The Bundesliga, for example, regards Britain as a “target D” market; it is not nearly as important as the United States, Japan, Scandinavia or Indonesia in terms of the league’s income.

The amount of money it will earn from its “multi-platform” model this season is only a little lower than it was generating from Sky alone; it is more than worth it to draw more eyeballs, to access new demographics, to start to draw more people into what leagues – as well as many other media organisations – think of as a funnel.

To Goldbridge, a sharp observer of his industry, the direction of travel is clear. “This is where I believe football is heading: choice,” as he said on his live stream. Some fans will prefer the familiar surrounds of the BBC website. Some will be drawn to The Overlap, with its Neville imprimatur.

Many more, though, will head to Goldbridge. They will not be put off by the minor missteps that marked his first attempt; they may, in fact, see them as an advantage, symbols of authenticity. “I am not going to sit here and pretend to be an expert on the Bundesliga,” he said. “We are all going to learn together.”

Photograph: goldbridgemark/Instagram