In recent weeks, a group of well known football journalists have decided to put the medium of podcast in their own hands in a new endeavour called “Libero”. Featuring the likes of Jonathan Wilson, Miguel Delaney and Rory Smith, it’s the familiar voices that you hear on an array of UK and Irish audio shows all in one place, chatting various elements of football in a very chilled, laid-back environment. It’s not trying to be reactionary, clickbaity, or demand some sort of notorious attention through rage content.
They are essentially the modern day Sunday Supplement, which got me thinking about the late Sunday morning roundtable discussion show that graced Sky Sports screens for the guts of 21 years.
In 2020 it got cancelled by Sky but continues to this day in podcast form. Over the previous decade or so it had become an increasingly tired television format that suddenly had competition from podcasts, which had become more accessible than ever and gave journalists of this ilk a more instantaneous platform to debate football throughout the week.
As well as that, the instant gratification of social media and the platform it provided to pretty much anyone with a football opinion meant television programmes like Sunday Supplement suddenly felt archaic and not long for this world.
More recently we’ve seen the rise of the football content influencer. These are people who have grafted on their own platforms, be it YouTube, Twitch or elsewhere, and built a name for themselves in the frenzied world of online content creation. They stream themselves playing video games, watch matches live along with their legions of fans, have their funnier moments clipped for sharing, and sit ready to hit the record button and spit fire whenever a big story occurs.
This is where the money is and where modern football discussion has positioned itself, in an effort to clickbait and monetize. Don’t get me wrong, there are several self-made content creators who have informed and reasoned thoughts on football and have managed to crack the code on the algorithms and build up a following online. But as that type of format becomes more mainstream, out has gone traditional football debate as we know it and in has come a blaze of influencers who talk only to elicit attention.
Who would want to watch a bunch of old geezers sat around a breakfast table when you can get instant hot takes from 90-second, easily monetized tidbits on TikTok and Twitter? Frankly, younger football fans couldn’t care less what Henry Winter or Martin Samuel had to say on a show that was on far too early in the morning anyway.
We, we being anyone north of about 33, aren’t the target audience anymore. We already shell out for the crazily expensive Sky Sports packages. Our sales targets are likely met with ease each year. No, Sky needed to turn their focus to grabbing a younger audience that have mastered the art of IPTV streaming. And because they’re unlikely to ever succumb to a Sky bill, the least Sky can do is capture their clicks on social media.
Sky realised this and they’ve sided with the YouTube influencer, the clickbait merchants, the famous faces and louder than life characters that push for attention. Out with Sunday Supplement and Goals on Sunday and in are Saturday Social, which is intended to be more connected to social media and talks directly to fans who are embedded in the comment sections on Twitter debating the value of Mo Salah over Cristiano Ronaldo in their all time Premier League XIs.
Although it likely has a young target audience, Saturday Social has somehow managed to be more sedate and inoffensive than even Sunday Supplement and far less illuminating than the likes of Goals on Sunday, which at least had a round-up of the goals from Saturday’s games. But that doesn’t matter because Saturday Social and its type isn’t designed for television — every component is a set piece for social media. It will be snipped, shared and blathered about in comment sections. Clicks made, job done.
Sky hooking their wagon onto Gary Neville’s suite of podcasts and the shareability of Roy Keane, Ian Wright and Neville talking shop are what makes for football content nowadays. Attention spans are short, not to mention divided a million different ways, give me a three-minute clip of Keane spitting fire over the latest performances of Bruno Fernandes rather than a very unconfrontational discussion on the back pages of the Sunday papers.
The last time journalists were given a prominent position on UK football television was when BT Sport’s European Football Show had the likes of James Horncastle, Julien Laurens and Raphael Honigstein following and reacting to games live in real time every Sunday night. It was intelligent, insightful and the most accessible entry to European football that we had had in a while.
It blew other shows with the usual rotation of ex-players out of the water, because it was experts who knew the leagues and the teams and the players inside out. They weren’t drawing from soundbites they’d read on Twitter or half-baked notions based on European football stereotypes, they were in the trenches and were able to deliver knowledgeable and engaging content.
That, too, eventually got binned.
The art of traditional football discussion is long gone. Podcasts fill a lot of the gaps, but television isn’t the medium for it anymore. Sunday Supplement will never have a lifeline in a world engineered for clicks. The cabal of journalists turning to Libero know this too, because they’ll never be given a television slot ahead of the likes of Rory Jennings because Rory has over 300,000 YouTube subscribers and an active online presence — his takes will convert views into clicks, which will turn into followers and maybe one day a paying subscriber.
And it’s all types of football “content”. I’ve long called for a modern twist on Masters Football, the 35 and over football league that aired on Sky back in the day. It was a big success and easy viewing, and with 2000s nostalgia and Prime Barclaysman the flavour of the month a whole new slate of ex-players with some sort of social media or digitized twist on the old format could’ve made for something fresh and interesting.
Instead, Sky have partnered with the Baller League, an influencer-led initiative where “former Premier League players, futsal players and celebrities” face one another in an indoor football tournament. With the likes of Luis Figo, Jens Lehmann and AngryGinge in the dugout, it aims to meld the world between real football and the online influencers.
The most recognisable name I could find in any of the squads was Henri Lansbury, who has 13 Premier League appearances to his name, and at 34 is now lining out for Tobi Brown’s VZN FC. Tobi has over five million subscribers on YouTube where he tries viral food and gets up to all sorts of antics with the “Sidemen”.
It’s a novel idea and clearly has a market amongst the younger streaming world, but it was a major personal death knell for football content on television ever really appealing to me again in the same way it used to. I’m clearly old cheese (I’m 33 this year). Like Lansbury, maybe its time for me to just suck it up and get on board with the world of football influencers and give their content a go. I always wanted to *check notes* watch 18 minutes of Tobi and IShowSpeed trying British snack foods.
The lads at the Libero podcast will quickly amass support and viewership given their status and intense knowledge on the sport, but they’ll never be given a platform on television. They won’t be the modern day Sunday Supplement panel, given a small slice of Sunday morning television to appeal to a starved corner of the football ecosystem. Because what they do — intelligent, nuanced, unconfrontational football conversation — just doesn’t sell.
The future of football content lays in snappy clips, sharp soundbites and instantaneous reactions. Even the sport itself wants to change make it shorter and snappier, with proposals often made to reduce the length of the games to appeal to a younger audience whose attention spans are near non existent.
As far as television is concerned, the art of football conversation is dead and gone in any meaningful sense — in 2025, it’s clickbait or die.
Enjoyed this piece (only just stumbled across it). A lot of what you have said was the driver of this very topic at a recent conference I attended. Sports journalism has the platforms, audiences and capture to be so agile... and yet the focus is often one dimensional
Who knows, maybe Smith, Delaney et al have gone in this direction because they know this is where the clicks, etc are.