Legacy media outfits have despaired as their audience and advertisers flee to the creator and influencer space and have made several botched and/or very expensive attempts to lure them back. C21 investigates whether football could be the answer.

As Manchester City’s attempt to rescue their season with a third consecutive FA Cup final appearance saw off the semi-final threat of Nottingham Forest at Wembley in April, blocks and blocks of empty seats in the City end prompted the usual online ridicule. City was only able to shift 27,000 of the 36,230 tickets in their allocation. After 29 trips to the refurbished stadium and seven consecutive FA Cup semi-finals, even the City fans have grown bored of their own team, the cost of tickets, and anti-social kick off times.

The Sidemen Charity Match is a regular friendly football game between influencers

German manager Thomas Tuchel is the tournament-master manager England have chosen to push their team on to a first trophy since the 1966 World Cup. Gareth Southgate did better than most – two European Championship finals, one World Cup semi – but England are going to next year’s tournament in the US, Mexico and Canada with an ambition to win. For his first home game in charge, there were around 10,000 empty seats. New broom, new optimism, but who really wants to spend their Friday night watching England play Albania?

One game that doesn’t have any trouble selling out Wembley is The Sidemen Charity Match. This recurring friendly game between influencers, organised by UK YouTube group The Sidemen, has quickly outgrown its previous homes at Southampton’s St Mary’s Stadium, Charlton’s The Valley and West Ham’s London Stadium since launching in 2016 and was able to sell all 90,000 seats for its Wembley debut in March in little more than three hours.

The biggest draw in football at the moment isn’t even a real football team.

Jordan Schwarzenberger, co-founder of Arcade Media and manager of The Sidemen, says: “It’s been quite a journey from very different beginnings to where it is now. When The Sidemen originally got in touch with the people at St Mary’s in Southampton and asked to host a football match, they said: ‘Of course not, who are you?’ They didn’t want to police it, so they gave them one stand and that sold out in 90 seconds. That was a lightbulb moment for them.

“At the end there was this huge pitch invasion – so perhaps St Mary’s were right to be concerned – and all the fans and their parents flocked on to the pitch to try and get close to these guys. I remember standing there and thinking this is totally different to anything I’ve ever seen and it has to be where connection is, being placed with creatives rather than, at that time, publishers like LadBible.”

While the match is held to raise millions of pounds for charity, it also shows the potential creators like The Sidemen offer brands who want to tap their audience.

“The Sidemen have a whole operation behind them that’s managed in quite a corporate, stuffy way but there’s enough expertise around the table to properly deliver, which means when brands come to work with us there is trust in the size and the numbers but also the creatives, producers, editors and the resources available. When we started working with them they had one person on payroll and now it’s up to 50,” Schwarzenberger says.

“Other creators have to have the mindset of working with a brand as a publisher. This is the big thing for me that’s coming into this space – creators realising they are an audience opportunity for brands rather than simply creators. Get in the mindset of being a publisher, like LadBible, Vice and these guys did before. If you think like a publisher and operate like an agency you can do quite simple things that go a long way – media plans, reporting, managing campaigns properly. It’s hard for creators who’ve never worked a real job or a job outside of content. They don’t understand that brands won’t just give you £50,000 for an Instagram story because that’s your rate. Those who have more of that agency-publisher mindset will do really well.”

The struggle for the more traditional “legacy media” brands that were left behind when audiences and advertisers flocked to places like The Sidemen is how do they regain a slice of that pie for themselves. Chuck US$100m at Mr Beast and give him complete creative control as Amazon’s Prime Video did? Bit expensive that.

It’s long been thought that these creators neither need nor even watch old school linear television, and nor do their audience. When you’ve got your own advertiser platform – which as Schwarzenberger points out is exactly what all of these influencers effectively are – why do you want to go and answer to a commissioning editor, director, production company to get a show on Channel 4’s advertiser platform, which none of your audience watch anyway?

Scenes put influencers pitchside during top-flight football coverage

Increasingly, though, there is crossover and it is football that holds the key. Creators might not be bothered about an ITV daytime commission, but they do want to be on Sky Sports shooting the breeze with Declan Rice.

Broadcasters like pay TV outfit Sky Sports are fast waking up to the potential. Classic staples of the schedule like Soccer AM, where 30-year-old blokes would shout, “She’s got the lot!” at teenage girls in Leeds United replica tops, or The Sunday Supplement, where four grizzled broadsheet hacks would chew the headlines over stale croissants and coffee, have been cancelled. In their place have come shows like The Saturday Social, where YouTubers rank Thierry Henry’s top five haircuts.

This has left the traditional football fan Sky originally built its business on in the 1990s (hand up, that might be me) feeling largely disenfranchised and switched off. Sky Sports News is largely seen as a joke among match-going fans. But when you see 90,000 members of an incredibly lucrative young ad market packing out Wembley, I can’t imagine anybody is losing much sleep about that down at Sky’s Isleworth HQ. Move with the times, or the times will move you.

One of the new shows the satcaster has enjoyed success with, and now renewed for a third season as exclusively revealed by C21, has been Scenes. The concept is simple: Sky Sports has access to every Premier League football game – use that to put influencers at the heart of top-flight football coverage, pitchside, in mixed zones with the players and let them bring their authentic style of storytelling to it.

The show is produced by London-based After Party Studios, a company that is pitching itself as a go-between linking the old world with the new, providing influencer-led ideas that audience will love to legacy media outfits that are desperate for a piece of the action.

Joshua Barnett, MD of After Party Studios, says Scenes grew out of a broad brief from the Sky Sports social team wanting to hit a next generation audience with its coverage of the forthcoming football season, but was initially a tough sell.

“They’d started to see there was a disconnect between Sky Sports and the younger audience,” Barnett said. “The brief was open; it could have been advertising, social first, YouTube series. We looked at the heritage of Sky, which has had unfettered access since the 1990s and is top of its game, and we looked for inspiration in content like Awaydays, which Copa90 did back in the day. We chanced upon Scenes, which isn’t really reinventing the wheel because it’s an elevated matchday Vlog, but we wanted to really do it well using the access from Sky, the Premier League and the clubs.

“The idea was born. We felt really good about it, and then there were many, many, many, many conversations because it was quite a leap of faith for Sky Sports at the time. You never quite know how a format will take hold but we’re 25 episodes in now.”

Cameron Sims, social lead at Sky Sports, says: “It was a long conversation, multiple different meetings – discussions not only with our colleagues at Sky but the Premier League as well. It wasn’t included in our rights or access so we had to build that. It was definitely a mindset shift. It’s a different world, it’s a different way of consuming content through a creator lens rather than something we think of traditionally at Sky Sports.

“Traditionally, we think we’ve got to be first, it’s got to have match footage in it, it’s got to have our pundits all over everything, it’s got to come from a background of tactical analysis or have real input. And now we’ve realised it didn’t need to have any of that to impact a younger audience.

“The first one we produced was a Sunday fixture and a Thursday episode, which was just baffling for the people at Sky. Why would they want to watch that? The game’s done. We’ve moved on to midweek European fixtures. We had to convince them they’re coming for the creators, the creator stories and seeing people interact with players and pundits they don’t see them interact with day to day. It was just about changing those mindsets.”

The first episode was filmed on the opening day of the 2023/24 season as Vincent Kompany’s Burnley hosted his former Man City team at Turf Moor.

Barnett at After Party says: “We were developing it. We’re two weeks out from the first game at Burnley and we come into the building at Sky and presented it to a room of 19 people – head of Sky Sports, head of football, head of Sky Sports News – and they were digging it out. They were asking, ‘Who is going to care about this footage?’ They just had to trust the process, trust bringing creators into this world, relatable formats, with the access, with the pundits. We’ll create magic and people will care. Luckily, it hit, and it kept on hitting.”

Sims says the series has changed attitudes at his employer. “We didn’t have to go through 19 meetings to get season three signed off, which is great,” he says. “We’ve taken elements from Scenes into other ways we think. How do we give the creator as much access and trust as we can? I’ve been in a lot of meetings asking questions like, ‘What is the Scenes equivalent for Sky Cinema?’

“How can we get creators to create their own content in their own way for their own channel that helps Sky Sports more broadly? It’s not just about bringing broader audiences to our channels, it’s about how we power content on creator channels. It’s not just about tangibles like subscribers going up, but Sky Sports being involved in creator conversations is very important to us. We want to power that more.”

Attitudes changed at one legacy media brand then, but who else is waking up to the possibilities?

Schwarzenberger believes such pairings with streamers will be the next turn of the wheel in the creator economy. The Sidemen have got their Inside series away with Netflix, while MrBeast paired with Amazon on his Beast Games format.

MrBeast paired with Amazon on his Beast Games format

“They’re two very different examples,” Schwarzenberger is swift to point out. “Beast Games cost them US$100m, Jimmy lost US$20m of his own money to fly people round in helicopters and buy an island. With Netflix and Inside it’s the opposite side of that – a format that can be scaled and done in different territories, but for cost can still be done in a YouTube way. It doesn’t need all the Netflixisms. They said they didn’t want to make it all Netflix, it had been proven to work, just do it your way.

“That’s a signal they’re looking at what connects with younger audiences. Ms Rachel must be the cheapest thing Netflix have ever made and that thing is stuck at number one in the children’s section for months. It’s absolutely flying and cost very little to make. When you have pre-validated concepts with billions of views and you just elevate it a bit by providing a platform and a nice new logo you can see that for so much less you deliver so much more by following the audience.

“Businesses have realised that taking big gambles on their platforms isn’t necessarily needed. Look at platforms like YouTube where creators can pilot it themselves and pre-validate it enough for companies to see there’s a market for it. I feel like a lightbulb has gone off for the streamers that this might be the way forward.”

Katie Matthews, partnerships director for sport at All3Media’s YouTube specialist Little Dot Studios, says there has definitely been a narrative shift and an awakening among broadcasters and streamers.

“Using influencers and creators to amplify content isn’t anything new but what you would previously see is an activation or piece of content and the comms team might bolt an influencer on to what was already being created,” Matthews says. “The shift we see is creators are the content and they’re involved in the creative process right from the start. That creates a really authentic piece of content that reaches the targeted audience.

“There are definitely ways for that to continue to evolve. The way that sports organisations, brands and business in general currently approach their mainstream media management, and the resource that goes into it, is teams of people in comms teams to manage relationships with outlets like Sky, The Times or The BBC, and c-suite content directors that are really bothered about what those organisations are writing and saying about the organisation. We’re not at that level with the creator world. As creators become more professional and act more like publishers you will see the response from that with organisations that will build teams led by very senior people who are worried about what creators or doing – in the same way they now worry about Sky, The Times or the BBC.

“You don’t need 19 people in a room to explain why you need pundits at the side of a pitch or The Times correspondent will be at the match, it’s just a given they will be there. That will be the evolution, it will just be a given. People won’t need mindsets changed because they will be changed.”

Jonny Keogh, head of UK sports at YouTube, says that awakening needs to happen fast or you risk being left behind. “There’s a professionalism about the creator space that’s breaking down tired and lazy misconceptions that creators are a kid in a bedroom with a webcam and it’s poor-quality stuff. The YouTube CEO said last year the Emmy’s should recognise creators and the creator economy because they are the production studios of the future, and are already.”

Matthews at Little Dot concludes: “There is still a perception that this is niche because the people at the top of organisations are not the natural audience for this creator content. You don’t need to explain to a CEO why you need a journalist at a game, but they might need convincing about an influencer and not feel comfortable with that. There needs to be that mindset shift, that it’s not a niche thing, it’s being seen by millions of people.

“Rights holders are asking us as an agency to help reach new, more diverse audiences, more younger fans, more female fans. The answer to that, inevitably, is working more with creators. It’s very mainstream and it will help organisations get to the heart of an issue they’re all trying to solve.”

This article is based in part on interviews and sessions at C21’s Create London conference in April.