Viral YouTuber on the path to become one of football’s most powerful men

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3 hours ago

August 22, 2025

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The growing popularity and reach of the Premier League globally is leaving rival European football competitions struggling to compete.

Not only to find an audience, but to find outlets to even show the matches.

So German football had to think differently – going to where Gen Z is engaging with football through content creators.

And that’s why tonight, Harry Kane’s Bayern Munich will begin their defence of the Bundesliga title live to 1.4 million subscribers on the That’s Football channel on YouTube.

It’s run by Mark Goldbridge, known for passionate but often provocative, punchy commentary about players on streams – often going viral.

His brand was built by being filmed reacting to Manchester United matches.

“People need to appreciate that we have a certain content style, and that’s very, very popular,” Goldbridge told Sky News.

“That is an area that needs to be catered [to] and that’s why, without the rights, we’ve had such big, big audiences.”

Goldbridge revealed he isn’t paying to show his 20 Friday night matches this season – reinforcing how the Bundesliga struggled to find a buyer in Britain.

Sky Sports previously had a four-year rights deal to exclusively show those German matches here, but will now only show the prestige Saturday evening slot live.

European leagues are finding it increasingly difficult in this market to sell their rights because domestic football is so dominant and appealing.

The focus of football budgets is on domestic games for Sky as well as Discovery-owned TNT Sports, which also focuses its European football coverage on men’s continental competitions, including the Champions League.

More Premier League matches will be shown live than ever before – with at least 215 on Sky, the parent company of Sky News, and others on TNT.

Sky Sports also has live men’s rights to the English Football League and Scottish matches, as well as sharing the Women’s Super League with the BBC.

The Bundesliga is also making the games broadcast by Goldbridge’s channel available to the BBC to stream online. They will further be on The Overlap, a YouTube channel part-owned by Gary Neville.

While the former England and Manchester United player is a star pundit on Sky, he could also be seen as a rival to the Comcast-owned broadcaster by attracting fans to newer outlets of his channel.

‘A progressive step’

Bundesliga International CEO Peer Naubert said: “Our approach is as diverse as our supporters: by combining established broadcasters with digital platforms and content creators, we are taking a progressive step in how top-level football can be experienced.

“This multi-layered strategy allows us to connect with more audiences across the UK and Ireland, giving every supporter the chance to engage … in the way that suits them best.”

Goldbridge doesn’t see himself as a rival yet to long-established broadcasters.

“We’re not looking to replace what you can find on Sky or the BBC or anything like that,” he said. “This is a community that will be live with us, watching the Bundesliga, learning about it.

“And if I get a pronunciation wrong, or I don’t know about a player, then I’ve got my community there to back me up. I don’t profess to know everything.”

‘This is the future’

But he can be relatable to audiences, with more than two million subscribing to his The United Stand channel, earning him millions of pounds over the last decade.

“We’ve been there growing in the background and I think certain media outlets have ignored that, maybe hoping it would go away,” he said.

“I certainly think synergy and collaboration need to happen more because there are things in the mainstream that I don’t like and there will be people out there that really don’t like the way we watch football, but a lot of people do.

“And it’s about offering that choice to people and there are different ways people listen to football on the radio, people watch it with a commentator, some people turn the audio off completely, some people watch things like this (watch-a-long).

“And I think that is the future, to offer more choice.”

World

What’s it like with the National Guard on the streets of DC?

Published

3 hours ago

August 22, 2025

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What's it like with the National Guard on the streets of DC?

👉 Follow Trump100 on your podcast app 👈

What’s it like on the streets of DC right now, as thousands of federal police patrol the streets?

Who is Steve Witkoff, the US envoy regularly meeting Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu to broker peace in Ukraine and Gaza?

And why is Californian Governor Gavin Newsom now tweeting like Donald Trump?

Martha Kelner and Mark Stone answer your questions.

If you’ve also got a question you’d like the Trump100 team to answer, you can email it to trump100@sky.uk.

You can also watch all episodes on our YouTube channel.

World

It’s been a confusing week – and Trump’s been made to look weak

Published

3 hours ago

August 22, 2025

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It’s been a confusing week.

The Monday gathering of European leaders and Ukraine’s president with Donald Trump at the White House was highly significant.

Ukraine latest: Trump changes tack

The leaders went home buoyed by the knowledge that they’d finally convinced the American president not to abandon Europe. He had committed to provide American “security guarantees” to Ukraine.

The details were sketchy, and sketched out only a little more through the week (we got some noise about American air cover), but regardless, the presidential commitment represented a clear shift from months of isolationist rhetoric on Ukraine – “it’s Europe’s problem” and all the rest of it.

Yet it was always the case that, beyond that clear achievement for the Europeans, Russia would have a problem with it.

Trump’s envoy’s language last weekend – claiming that Putin had agreed to Europe providing “Article 5-like” guarantees for Ukraine, essentially providing it with a NATO-like collective security blanket – was baffling.

Russia gives two fingers to the president

And throughout this week, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has repeatedly and predictably undermined the whole thing, pointing out that Russia would never accept any peace plan that involved any European or NATO troops in Ukraine.

“The presence of foreign troops in Ukraine is completely unacceptable for Russia,” he said yesterday, echoing similar statements stretching back years.

Remember that NATO’s “eastern encroachment” was the justification for Russia’s “special military operation” – the invasion of Ukraine – in the first place. All this makes Trump look rather weak.

It’s two fingers to the president, though interestingly, the Russian language has been carefully calibrated not to poke Trump but to mock European leaders instead. That’s telling.

The bilateral meeting (between Putin and Zelenskyy) hailed by Trump on Monday as agreed and close – “within two weeks” – looks decidedly doubtful.

Maybe that’s why he went along with Putin’s suggestion that there be a bilateral, not including Trump, first.

It’s easier for the American president to blame someone else if it’s not his meeting, and it doesn’t happen.

NATO defence chiefs met on Wednesday to discuss the details of how the security guarantees – the ones Russia won’t accept – will work.

European sources at the meeting have told me it was all a great success. And to the comments by Lavrov, a source said: “It’s not up to Lavrov to decide on security guarantees. Not up to the one doing the threatening to decide how to deter that threat!”

The argument goes that it’s not realistic for Russia to say from which countries Ukraine can and cannot host troops.

Would Trump threaten force?

The problem is that if Europe and the White House want Russia to sign up to some sort of peace deal, then it would require agreement from all sides on the security arrangements.

The other way to get Russia to heel would be with an overwhelming threat of force. Something from Trump, like: “Vladimir – look what I did to Iran…”. But, of course, Iran isn’t a nuclear power.

Something else bothers me about all this. The core concept of a “security guarantee” is an ironclad obligation to defend Ukraine into the future.

Future guarantees would require treaties, not just a loose promise. I don’t see Trump’s America truly signing up to anything that obliges them to do anything.

A layered security guarantee which builds over time is an option, but from a Kremlin perspective, would probably only end up being a repeat of history and allow them another “justification” to push back.

Image and reality don’t seem to match

Among Trump’s stream of social media posts this week was an image of him waving his finger at Putin in Alaska. It was one of the few non-effusive images from the summit.

He posted it next to an image of former president Richard Nixon confronting Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev – an image that came to reflect American dominance over the Soviet Union.

That may be the image Trump wants to portray. But the events of the past week suggest image and reality just don’t match.

The past 24 hours in Ukraine have been among the most violent to date.

World

At least 17 dead in Colombia after car bombing and helicopter attack

Published

3 hours ago

August 22, 2025

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At least 17 dead in Colombia after car bombing and helicopter attack

At least 17 people were killed after a car bombing and an attack on a police helicopter in Colombia, officials have said.

Authorities in the southwest city of Cali said a vehicle loaded with explosives detonated near a military aviation school, killing five people and injuring more than 30.

Authorities said at least 12 died in the attack on a helicopter transporting personnel to an area in Antioquia in northern Colombia, where they were to destroy coca leaf crops – the raw material used in the production of cocaine.

Antioquia governor Andres Julian said a drone attacked the helicopter as it flew over coca leaf crops.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro attributed both incidents to dissidents of the defunct Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

He said the aircraft was targeted in retaliation for a cocaine seizure that allegedly belonged to the Gulf Clan.

Who are FARC, and are they still active?

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a Marxist guerrilla organisation, was the largest of the country’s rebel groups, and grew out of peasant self-defence forces.

It was formed in 1964 as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party, carrying out a series of attacks against political and economic targets.

In 2016, after more than 50 years of civil war, FARC rebels and the Colombian government signed a peace deal.

It officially ceased to be an armed group the following year – but some small dissident groups rejected the agreement and refused to disarm.

According to a report by Colombia’s Truth Commission in 2022, fighting between government forces, FARC, and the militant group National Liberation Army had killed around 450,000 people between 1985 and 2018.

Both FARC dissidents and members of the Gulf Clan operate in Antioquia.

It comes as a report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that coca leaf cultivation is on the rise in Colombia.

The area under cultivation reached a record 253,000 hectares in 2023, according to the UN’s latest available report.