Watching people watch a match. With 100,000 friends.

With the lights adjusted and the cameras rolling, the production team gives Joe Smith his cue. In five seconds he’ll be broadcasting live to a few thousand people. Mr. Smith’s thoughts, however, are elsewhere. “Slate is the absolute best way to build a roof,” he mutters to his co-host, Jay Mottershead, as the countdown reaches three. “All these years they didn’t make it.”

And with that, they are in the air. They will remain that way for the next four hours, essentially uninterrupted: a test for the duration of the broadcast, staged in an underground studio, all brick and industrial lighting, in the middle of Manchester’s hip Northern Quarter.

Before they have finished, they will have touched on a variety of topics, including: the somewhat alarming frequency with which Mr. Mottershead has nightmares; the declining popularity of lemon curd; and the story of a man who goes to Mr. Smith’s gym solely to read vintage copies of “Cars” magazine.

Occasionally their freewheeling, somewhat anarchic conversation is interrupted by what is ostensibly the purpose of the evening’s activity: keeping up with the match between the football team they support, Manchester United, and the Danish champions FC Copenhagen.

After all, that’s what will draw over 100,000 people to their livestream over the course of those four hours. However, it’s the distractions, the tangents, and the stream of consciousness about roofing that will keep them there.

Hard core community

The concept of watching two people watch a football match may sound like a distinctly postmodern form of entertainment, a close cousin to the gaming streams spreading on Twitch and the unboxing videos that for some reason kids are watching on YouTube. fascinate.

In football, however, the form has deep roots. After all, the idea of ​​making most games available on television is relatively recent. In Britain, home of the Premier League, many matches are still being ruled out in the interests of protecting stadium attendances.

For years, because they’re not allowed to show these games, broadcasters have had little choice but to find creative ways to keep viewers informed about what’s happening in the games. Most have opted for the format pioneered by Sky’s “Soccer Saturday” – launched in the 1990s – in which a series of former players sit in a studio and watch feeds of the games that only they can see, and viewers on the keep you informed of important moments. live. (Think of the NFL’s popular Red Zone channel, only without actually seeing anyone play football.)

The form of the show that Mr. Mottershead and Mr. Smith host Streford Paddockthe Manchester United fan channel they co-own – or its counterparts on outlets such as The Redmen TV (Liverpool) and We are Tottenham TV (self-explanatory) – is essentially the same. However, the function is different.

Most of their viewers, Mr Mottershead said, also watch the matches, legally or illegally. “They refuse to comment and listen to us instead,” he said. They do this because they want a much more specific product: for example, the Stretford Paddock crowd only wants updates about Manchester United, and not news about anyone else playing at the same time.

And, crucially, they want these updates not to be delivered by the compromised and biased mouthpieces of the mainstream media – what they see as pensioners protecting their friends and business interests, or by commentators with vague but clear biases against their club – but by colored-the-wool fans like them. “We may disagree on some things,” Mr Mottershead said. “But we all want United to do well.”

Still, after more than six years of leading watchalongs with Mr. Smith, Mr. Mottershead has come to believe that what attracts fans is not simply a matter of meeting their obsessions and confirming their prejudices.

What his viewers are looking for, he thinks, is simple. They want someone to watch the game with them.

Viral empire

The part of the football industry that is made for fans and by fans is necessarily tribal. Each club essentially exists in its own silo. The biggest names in Manchester United’s content universe will be largely foreign to those who follow Liverpool, just as celebrated Arsenal podcasters will have little or no resonance with Tottenham supporters.

The crowning exception is Mark Goldbridge, the 44-year-old livestream queen of football and the genre’s one and only crossover star. It’s not just that his fan channel, The United Position, currently has 1.77 million YouTube subscribers. The fact is that almost every time Manchester United lose (or draw, or concede a goal), they are likely to achieve many millions more.

Footage from Mr. Goldbridge’s streams goes reliably viral: rants that alternately splenic, wildly NSFW., and vaguely surreal. He will cry that Manchester United’s defense has ‘all the resistance of a papadum catching a bowling ball’, or that the club accidentally employs ‘a team of slow giraffes’.

What exactly it is about Mr. Goldbridge that has made him so prominent is difficult to determine, and he gave no clues: he declined, through his representation, to be interviewed for this article, on the grounds that he is currently exploring opportunities outside ‘the viewing room.”

In interviews, Mr Goldbridge has accepted that there is an element of cringe comedy, in the style of David Brent or Alan Partridgeuntil his delivery. Peter McPartland, a host on Toffee TV, a channel dedicated to Everton, agreed. “He has an awkwardness that makes him funny,” he said.

Whatever it is, it’s undeniably effective. “He’s built an empire,” says Paul Machin, founder of The Redmen TV, Liverpool’s fan channel. The problem lies less with his success, other presenters said, and more with the copycats he has inspired.

“People are seeing his videos go viral,” said Mr Machin, “so now there are a lot of Manchester United watchalongs where people you’ve never seen before get a bit carrying out their anger.”

The economics of the internet, in theory, drives virality. In an industry where there is a direct correlation between clicks and revenue, going viral is seen as the biggest prize the final goal of all online content.

Those who make their living from fan channels, however, see that kind of attention less as a goal and more as a danger. “We don’t want that virality,” said Ben Daniel, who founded We Are Tottenham TV with his brother Simon in 2017.

Clips that break tribal lines usually do so by attracting a significant share of “hate watches,” he said — opinions from fans of other clubs who revel in another team’s suffering. But those aren’t people who hit the like button or subscribe. Virality, it turns out, brings the wrong kind of fame.

Parasocial

On the face of it, the rewards for watchdog fame are slim. YouTube’s algorithm is biased towards shorter videos, not hour-long broadcasts. The platform’s chats, which allow viewers to attach payments to their comments or questions, generate only a few hundred dollars in revenue.

The benefits are largely second-order. They are worth it, Mr. Smith said, because they can boost subscriptions. Most of the time, though, they do this because “it would be weird not to: the game is the culmination of everything we talk about.”

He and Mr. Mottershead are old hands by the standards of the genre: Stretford Paddock has been participating in watchalongs for almost ten years. Most of the newer versions have their roots in the pandemic, when social distancing rules kept fans from attending games in person.

Before then, fan channels focused on offering supporters who couldn’t or couldn’t attend matches a digital version of the experience: a taste of it from outside the stadium and from within the crowd, before, during and after the matches.

That was not possible with the empty stands. All that was left was to provide running commentary on the games they, like any other fan, watched on television.

However, when fans returned to the stands, broadcasters noticed there was still a sizable audience craving that kind of in-game coverage. “It was so popular we couldn’t drop it,” Mr. Machin said of The Redmen TV experience.

The makers of Premier League watchalongs say they all appeal to roughly the same audience, distinguished only by tribal loyalty: fans generally aged 16 to 35, although a significant proportion are slightly older. A slim majority live in Britain, but there are healthy constituencies in Ireland, the United States and Australia, as well as whatever country a given team’s stars live in. Tottenham, for example, has a significant following in South Korea thanks to the club’s beloved captain, Son Heung-min.

They also all watch for pretty much the same reason. “People want to feel that connection to their clubs,” Mr. Machin said, no matter where they live.

Watchalongs create a different kind of bond: a form of what psychologists call a parasocial relationship. Viewers want their prejudices to be reinforced. They want to know how other like-minded fans react to the games. But they also want the digressions, the asides about roofing and nightmares and cultural appropriation when it comes to hairstyles.

After all, they’re watching from home, all over the world, each locked in their own little silo. What they want, more than sharp insight, expert analysis or even a cheap laugh, is a connection with people doing the exact same thing.

Mr Mottershead and Mr Smith do not attempt to provide them with detailed comments. They try to recreate the feeling, Mr. Mottershead said, of “watching the game with your friends.”