Sports rights-holders are scrambling for younger audiences, experimenting with YouTube streams, watchalongs and influencer-led coverage. In his first article for SVG Europe, editor-at-large Callum McCarthy examines why authenticity, not production gloss, is what wins hearts in the streaming era.

Any time the word ‘strategic’ is used to describe a sports rights deal, you can guarantee someone is getting the raw end of it.

In the 2010s, broadcasters and agencies would pay ‘strategic premiums’ for rights to European football leagues – a term now understood to be a synonym for ‘paying too much’.

In the 2020s, it’s the rights-holders’ turn to make ‘strategic’ decisions as they explore new live distribution options and throw content at a variety of walls to see if any of it sticks.

It’s hard to blame rights-holders for trying something new in a landscape that has hardly been tougher this century. Major sports broadcasters across Europe are saving every penny they can. The pan-regional pay-television giants of the Asia-Pacific region are no more. A new world of TikTok, Roblox and Discord has hooked kids and young adults with content so hyper-engaging that a mid-table Bundesliga derby looks like drying paint by comparison.

“Brazil’s dominant media machine has finally acknowledged that Cazé TV is in the process of eating its lunch and has ambitions of staying for dinner as well”

At first glance, someone like Mark Goldbridge appears to be a part of the solution for sports rights-holders looking to crack the code. Goldbridge is a YouTuber that pioneered the watchalong content format and remains its most famous English-language exponent. Until this season, the genre had flourished without any live stream of the event in question, focusing instead on the host’s reactions and emotions, as well as interaction with the live chat window.

This season, the Bundesliga has looked to add fuel to the format, granting live rights to Goldbridge’s That’s Football YouTube channel for Friday night games as the league tries to push its content on younger audiences.

You probably know about the Goldbridge deal already. The agreement has generated an unprecedented amount of publicity in the UK for a non-Premier League rights deal and has been lauded as a watershed moment for sports broadcasting in the country, not least by Goldbridge himself.

“I very much look at this like something the younger generation are gonna get involved in because it’s new, and the older generation are gonna think this is a lot like Italian football on Channel 4 back in the 90s,” Goldbridge said on his opening night stream of Bayern Munich v. RB Leipzig, which performed on par with his watchalong streams of non-Manchester United matches.

Unfortunately, much of Goldbridge’s core audience had found other content to get involved in during the recent Hamburg derby, which achieved some of the lowest viewership figures recorded on Goldbridge’s That’s Football channel for many years.

Tuesday night live streams of an off-the-shelf Bundesliga highlights package have fared even worse than that, attracting the lowest viewership of any live stream shown on the That’s Football channel since it was rebranded in 2020.

Goldbridge has noticed the disappointing viewership and is already polling viewers on whether to continue streaming highlights.

The early signs aren’t good, but they’re worse elsewhere.

The Bundesliga has also shared its Friday-night-plus-highlights package with the BBC and with podcast The Overlap (a spin-off of which, The Overlap on Tour, airs on Sky). Friday night Bundesliga games are being shown on The Overlap’s YouTube channel, which usually features ex-pros Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Ian Wright and Ellen White – none of whom are watching along with the Bundesliga.

“Lol, why is this live on here,” asked ‘Jack’ in The Overlap’s sparsely-populated Hamburg derby live chat.

“Are you guys actually going to do any watchalongs for the Bundesliga?” asked viewer Alex Pettitt. “This kind of coverage where you’re putting the TV feed on YouTube without adding anything to it just feels incredibly lazy.”

Far from engaging younger audiences, these TV-to-YouTube streams may be doing the Bundesliga more harm than good. The league is now learning a valuable lesson on behalf of rights-holders across the sports industry: your premium, live, made-for-TV productions are not a gift to the world of YouTube and Twitch.

Users on these platforms want interactivity, authenticity and personality. Without it, content of any kind is dead on arrival.

Kids see straight through you

The runaway success story of Cazé TV in Brazil was born from a similar ‘strategic’ move to the Bundesliga’s, beginning as an agency’s last resort and ending up as the single most transformational sports media company in Latin America.

The story goes that LiveMode, the Brazilian agency entrusted to sell rights to the 2022 Fifa World Cup in Brazil, had knocked on every door in Brazil to find a buyer for its last remaining live rights package before throwing a final Hail Mary pass to Casimiro Miguel, the influencer and streaming personality they managed.

Over the course of that summer, Miguel, LiveMode and Cazé TV caught the pass and ran into the endzone, where they are still celebrating three years later.

After breaking YouTube’s live viewership records in 2022, Cazé TV has gone on to become the second-biggest sports broadcaster in Brazil, holding rights to the Olympic Games, Club World Cup, the Brasileirao and a host of European football leagues looking to tap into its millions-strong audience of young, football-obsessed men.

Key to Cazé’s success has been the authenticity of the emotions on show. Casimiro and his cast of misfits are undeniably engaged in what they, and you, are watching. There is no room for censorship or restraint. His feelings are visceral, just like yours.

Brazil is now hurtling towards a YouTube-first sports broadcasting market on the back of Miguel’s expletive-laden analysis. Globo, Brazil’s dominant media machine, has finally acknowledged that Cazé TV is in the process of eating its lunch and has ambitions of staying for dinner as well.

Globo has responded by launching its new ‘GE’ YouTube channel that will go head to head with Cazé, showing live Brazilian club football with its own cast of larger-than-life presenters. Whether these people can match Miguel’s authenticity remains to be seen, but it will be the difference between success and failure.

 However much the Bundesliga or anyone else may try, authenticity isn’t something that can be bought, sold or manufactured. Prior to his current one-season deal, Goldbridge had never streamed watchalongs for German football and for good reason: he doesn’t care about German domestic football, and neither do his audience.

A quick glance at a Goldbridge Manchester United watchalong tells you the story. He is frustrated, incandescent and exasperated – he once suggested that digging up his dead dog and placing it in goal would be preferable to United’s current goalkeeper, André Onana. These are the emotions that have built Goldbridge a mini media empire. But when the subject of his attention is a VfB Stuttgart defender he’s never heard of, the emotions simply don’t surface.

It’s for this reason that Goldbridge’s comparison to Channel 4’s acquisition of Italian Serie A rights back in 1992 misses the mark so badly.

Channel 4’s Italian football coverage was led by James Richardson, a maverick English journalist who moved to Italy thanks to a passion for its football, culture and people. His laid-back presenting style, along with Channel 4’s bespoke production of live matches and shoulder content, was an authentic love letter to Serie A. Millions of viewers went along for the ride.

Meanwhile, thousands of young people are watching the Bundesliga on Friday nights with bated breath, waiting for something to love.