In August 2025, the Bundesliga announced an innovative broadcast contract in the United Kingdom and Ireland. A blend of traditional media and content creators, it certainly caused a stir.
The response surprised Peer Naubert.
Naubert is the CEO of Bundesliga International and, eight months on, he is reflecting on that reaction and what has followed since.
“When we did the announcement, I was really taken aback by the positive impact and the buzz we created,” he tells The Athletic. “And since then, we’ve been really positively surprised by the viewership numbers and by the co-operation with our partners, because they’re demanding more and more content each week.”
It’s a hybrid agreement. The Bundesliga’s Saturday night and Sunday afternoon games are shown on Sky Sports and Amazon Prime, respectively, but the Friday night fixture is shared between the BBC and YouTube, where it appears on the Bundesliga’s own channel, as well as creator networks The Overlap and That’s Football, a channel hosted by the creator Mark Goldbridge.
The Bundesliga launched its first free ad-supported television (FAST) channel in the UK with Samsung this season, and also shows some 2.Bundesliga action via its own YouTube channel.
It was a first for one of the major European leagues in the UK, and the non-traditional nature of the agreement meant that it was, comfortably, the most media interest the Bundesliga had received for an international rights package announcement in recent years. It was a different road taken for good reason.
The Bundesliga’s long-term broadcasting partner in the UK is Sky Sports. They still show the league’s Saturday night fixture, which is often the biggest game of the weekend. However, the Premier League’s command of its domestic market has left little space for additional programming.
Or budget. One of the challenges facing the broadcasting market is a shift in focus, from pay TV and streaming services alike, away from acquiring new subscribers and towards profitability. The era of accumulating new properties and writing big cheques is, for now, at an end. Serie A, La Liga and Ligue 1 have all faced significant difficulties in recent years and a range of setbacks.
So, the Bundesliga — like every league other than the Premier League — needs to think creatively. Partly because of those issues, but also because of legislative restraints on ownership.
The 50+1 rule, mandating that majority ownership remains with supporters, discourages the kind of investment that has flooded into the Premier League, bringing with it an array of stars. By contrast, German football’s virtues are its proud regional traditions, its fan culture, and the vibrancy of its atmosphere, none of which are quite as simple to export. The fact that Bayern Munich have won 11 league titles in 12 years is inconvenient, too.
But for the Bundesliga and Naubert, these were prompts that justified trying something different.
“It just didn’t make sense to employ the same tactics that have worked in the past,” Naubert says. “We have great, longstanding partners around the world, and this is still a key part of the puzzle. But to continue making progress, we also need to think outside the box.
“We make doing our homework a priority. We spoke with all the players in the market and decided that a multi-platform broadcast mix delivers reach and revenues. We not only maintain our position on the leading channels but also extend our visibility. Catching everyone’s attention is another good sign.”
The selection of the new partners was logical. The BBC is the BBC; a strong brand name trusted by older viewers with traditional broadcasting habits. The Overlap and That’s Football obviously appeal to different demographics, who consume their entertainment in different ways, but each has become a strong, influential voice, albeit pitched differently.
But that variety is entirely the point.
The Bundesliga is shown on The Overlap and Mark Goldbridge’s That’s Football YouTube channel (Daniela Porcelli/Getty Images)
Naubert says, “They were among the biggest and best football creators in the UK. But they are also gathering exactly the right audience — 50 per cent of which is under 35.”
The results have been encouraging. In the UK market, compared with the viewing figures in 2024-25 (when Sky Sports was the sole rights holder), the audience through the first five games of the season was 15 times larger. During that five-game period, the cumulative YouTube audience alone grew by 57 per cent. There has also been a 150 per cent increase in social media mentions for the Bundesliga in the UK.
Perhaps the most significant figure, however, is that as of matchday 10, 57 per cent of the UK audience who watched Bundesliga games on the two YouTube channels were aged between 13 and 34. Studies suggest the average UK-based football fan is 40.2 years old.
The creators are enjoying it, too. Goldbridge — real name Brent Di Cesare — told The Athletic: “I’ve really enjoyed it. In a football sense, there have been some big eye-openers: how much better the game flows with officials and players constantly getting the game going and penalising delays.
“In the recent north London derby, I counted four minutes lost on players preparing to take long throws. There are far fewer goalless draws, too, and the crowds are incredible, mainly because of fan ownership.”
Dave Bouchard from The Overlap also spoke to The Athletic about the partnership and some of the performance data it has produced: “It’s been fantastic to stream live Friday night Bundesliga football, one of the best leagues in the world, on The Overlap, and we have witnessed great audience integration figures.
“Over 1.5 millon people have watched live football and social clips with us, and more than 7.5 million watched our greatest German player of all time ‘corridor cam’.”
Harrison, from The Overlap Breakdown, has been providing tactical analysis and previews of the games, too, and he tells The Athletic that he’s also enjoyed the experience.
“Having direct access to match footage and data has been invaluable. Through the preview episodes we produce for every Friday night game streamed on The Overlap, I’ve been able to explore teams that many viewers might not know too well, while closely following emerging talents such as Can Uzun, Yan Diomande and Said El Mala.
“With so many high-profile moves out of the league this summer, including Benjamin Sesko, Florian Wirtz, Hugo Ekitike and Xavi Simons, it’s been a unique experience to analyse players of that level week in, week out and assess how their careers might develop.
“Overall, it’s been a genuinely rewarding experience and one I’ve learned a great deal from. More broadly, it feels like a positive reflection of where the game is heading and how accessible football is becoming around the world.”
There are separate challenges to face for the Bundesliga. The first is to make it as easy as possible for new fans to find. But raw visibility is just one step. These YouTube audiences are being attracted to the channels and the creators in the first instance, not the football. This is a start, not a solution.
“But I really like creators,” says Naubert. “We see them as cultural bridges rather than media channels. They reach into new communities. Creators help people discover the Bundesliga, but then we, as a league, must give them a reason to stay, whether it be through shared values, narratives or individual personalities of the players. That’s our job.”
This is the fan journey. Can this lead to someone from the Friday YouTube audience taking an interest in Bundesliga games across the rest of the weekend? Might that person one day travel to Germany to watch a game, over time becoming a fan of the club? Can that migration be parlayed into a more lucrative rights package in the future?
These are the calculations — the sum that nobody quite has the formula for yet.
There’s reason for optimism, though, given the Bundesliga’s recent progress in Brazil.
In 2018, the league had 12million registered fans in the country. By 2024, that number had doubled, to 24million, making the Bundesliga the fastest-growing international league in Brazil. Before the 2023-24 season, a new rights package in the region was agreed, with striking similarities to what is now in place in the UK.
The tranches of games were split between SporTV and SportyNet, which are pay-TV networks; RedeTV, Cultura, and X Sports, each of which broadcast free-to-air; and, finally, digital streamers Canal Goat and Caze TV, both of which have millions of followers on Instagram and TikTok.
Brazil is a priority market for the Bundesliga. On a player-by-player basis, it is the most represented country — other than Germany — in the league’s history. Lucio, Diego, Grafite, Ze Roberto and Paulo Sergio all spent the prime of their careers in the Bundesliga. Clearly, that helps. Nevertheless, the growth over the past few years is startling.
During the 2024-25 season, Bundesliga matchdays in Brazil averaged a total audience of 5million — with Bayern vs Dortmund averaging more than 2million each time — which represents an increase of more than 800 per cent on equivalent figures from a decade ago. This makes it the most-watched European league in the country.
A new rights package was agreed in November 2025, again including Caze TV and Canal Goat, and is due to begin ahead of the 2026-27 season. Mostly working with the same set of partners since the 2023-24 season, revenues have grown approximately fivefold in this time, which suggests the model is working.
No two broadcasting territories are the same. Clearly, the Bundesliga has strengths in Brazil — and South America as a whole — that it does not possess in the UK and Ireland. So, it’s not as simple as taking a strategy from one region and using it in another. But Naubert and the Bundesliga want to apply what they have learned — to think long term and to adapt to a marketplace which is changing all the time.
“For us, this is a test-and-learn approach. We had clear targets in terms of audience growth and penetration, but while being the first to explore new broadcast opportunities, we also have to remain open to seeing what happens. And this is a three-to-five-year project, not one year.
“Are we happy with what we have at the moment? We have significantly increased our viewership while also maintaining our revenues and being in a much younger market, which hopefully prepares us for the future.
“And that’s what we perceive as success right now. Do I have the proof that in 10 years we’re going to see significant fandom among what by then will be thirty-somethings? I don’t know the answer to that.
“But now we’re laying the foundation to prepare ourselves for that future, and the clear answer was not to remain static or one-dimensional.
“I’m 100 per cent convinced that this is the right thing to be doing.”