In 2012, former reggae radio host Robbie Lyle decided he’d had enough. Of who? Of the “so-called” pundits whose haughty opinions about Arsenal Football Club did not speak to him. They with their sports journalism degrees, their NCTJs, their egregious cosy-ness with the despicables in charge of Arsenal. He decided to do something about it. Lyle started taking his camera to matches and filming fans outside afterwards. He wanted to air opinions that were real.
You won’t need to be a football obsessive to have some latent knowledge of the genre Lyle birthed: the fan-channel. A vessel-busted man staring into a camera explaining why a struggling Ecuadorian left-back is a “total disgrace”. Lyle’s YouTube channel was called Arsenal Fan TV, and its first big video came a year or so in. It featured a man demanding Daily Mirror sportswriter John Cross “get off [his] arse”. It earned 1.5 million views (Cross stood accused of failing to “say it as it is” during a dip in the team’s form). Lyle was onto something.
At school, in Kent, where lots of my friends were Arsenal fans, Arsenal Fan TV was a gift. The guys from AFTV, Mr DT, Mo, Troopz, Ty, Turkish, White Yardie, and a bombinating fool called Lee Judges, made a show of themselves every week, indirectly but nonetheless penetratingly, making a show of all my friends. (To my shame, I actually became personally embroiled in an unprintable online back-and-forth with an Arsenal Youtuber in 2013 over a disputed red card in a Champions League fixture. Then again, he was forty-something, and I was 13.)
Two years after Lyle launched the genre, Mark Goldbridge appeared, and the tables turned on me and the United fans. His real name was Brent Di Cesare, a life insurance salesman turned police officer for West Midlands Police, investigating financial fraud. In previous podcasts he’s said he saw upwards of 10 dead bodies in the line of duty. Perhaps inspired by the early progress made by Lyle, he started hosting online ‘hang outs’ of a dozen or so people to talk about Premier League games. And like Lyle, he soon quit the day job. Goldbridge quickly settled on the format that made him: Sitting at home filming himself watching Manchester United games. You can’t see the game — only him. And he always becomes furiously angry. That’s it. He called it The United Stand.
Why am I telling you all this? A fair question at this juncture. This isn’t exactly a typical Mill subject. But Mark Goldbridge, whether or not you’ve heard of him, this week cemented himself as among the global representatives of Manchester’s foremost institution (much to the chagrin of most people who care about Manchester’s foremost institution) when he was bought out by Gary Neville in a seven-figure deal. How exactly has he done it?
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A tale of two fan channels
Around the time Goldbridge was starting out, a group of friends – Adam Mckola, Jay Motty, Stephen Howson – formed their own Manchester United fan channel. It was called Full Time Devils, and later became Stretford Paddock. As Motty tells me, the early days involved standing outside Old Trafford filming themselves on their phones — often “near the ticket office because the light was good”.
In those days fan channels were largely seen as a blight. The position of the so-called traditional sports media was to turn up its nose; much as a trained journalist might be suspicious of the modern ‘citizen journalist’ phenomenon. But as time went by, the success of the likes of Full Time Devils became hard to ignore. The channel grew fast, and spoke to something fans evidently felt was lacking.
And the old-school balked. Tentative offers started coming in for Motty, Howson and such to appear on Sky, or the BBC. Much less so for Goldbridge, however, who was seen as absolutely beyond the pale.
Why? Goldbridge’s approach has always been controversial. You wouldn’t need to watch much of his stuff to see why. The criticism of the players is often highly personal, for one thing. And the reactions are always ludicrous. But it works. Goldbridge's own channels upload compilation videos of him, titled things like 'GOLDBRIDGE ALL-TIME RAGES'. They have time-stamp helping you navigate to the bits where he becomes most furious (i.e., 1:25: 'You look like a tin of salmon' – this is Goldbridge banging his fists on his desk calling defender Phil Jones a "prat" over and over because he's wearing pink boots). Indeed, a popular conspiracy theory posits that he isn’t a United fan at all, rather a Nottingham Forest-supporting double agent sent to make a mockery of United fans around the world.
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