English Premier League football club Manchester United has launched an official channel on YouTube, breaking a cycle where it was the most-viewed club on the video-sharing platform purely through unofficial content.
United was the only Premier League club, and the only outfit amongst the world’s top teams, not to have an official presence on YouTube, but will now offer hundreds of free videos through the platform.
United said this content will be broken down into first-team features aiming to show players in a different light, stylised match footage such as ‘Dave Saves’ – a compilation of some of keeper David de Gea’s best performances, and videos of club legends.
Top 10 compilations will also feature, as well as classic matches and content featuring United’s celebrity fans. “Amazingly, even without an official football channel it is the most viewed club in the world on YouTube,” Tomos Grace, YouTube’s head of sport for Europe, Middle East and Africa, told UK newspaper The Guardian.
“But one channel that people are looking for is the official Manchester United voice. The plans they have are very exciting. They want to go big.”
YouTube said that since the start of the 2017-18 season views of United video content have risen 60 per cent year on year to almost 850 million. In terms of clubs, Spanish LaLiga duo Barcelona and Real Madrid are currently the most subscribed teams on YouTube with 3.7 million and 2.7 million followers, respectively.
United’s city rival Manchester City is third with one million, while German Bundesliga champion Bayern Munich has 821,000 subscribers and Liverpool 819,000. “The club’s vision is to be the largest and most engaged sports club in the world,” a Manchester United spokeswoman said. “Our presence on platforms such as YouTube will allow us to achieve this vision.
“YouTube will allow us to continue to evolve our demographics, as well as provide us with analytics and insights to feed not only our media and content plans but other cross-club initiatives.
“Our YouTube channel has no impact on MUTV or our other social media platforms and they will complement each other. Each have their own set of content, a large portion of which will be exclusive to each of the platforms.”