Gareth Southgate's 1071 Media Teams Up With Sky Sports on Three Football Shows
Gareth Southgate's media company, 1071 Media, has agreed a partnership with Sky Sports to make football content for YouTube and podcasts. The partnership will launch three shows.
The first is The Football Dugout, a weekly podcast and YouTube show about the tactical side of the game, meaning how teams set up and why they play the way they do. It will be hosted by Mark Chapman, a Sky Sports football presenter, alongside Conor Coady, a former England defender. Chapman and Coady will talk through the tactics that shape matches, the kind of detail fans often argue about on the way home.
The second is The Football Boardcast, hosted by Christian Purslow and Henry Winter. Its focus is money, power and politics in football, the off-pitch decisions that shape clubs and competitions. Purslow and Winter are both well known for covering that side of the sport.
The third is The Football Data Room, a Sky Sports YouTube show that mixes data with analysis. Numbers are the backbone of the show, with the aim of explaining what the figures mean for the game.
Southgate launched 1071 Media with Jimmy Worrall. The company is named after the Pennsylvania shorthand for... no, leave that out; the company's name is simply the one it trades under. Under the deal, Sky Media will sell the 1071 Media and Sky Sports formats commercially. A format is a show idea that can be sold to broadcasters in other countries, which then make their own version. That means the shows could travel beyond the UK, depending on how those sales go.
For viewers, the appeal is in the mix. Three very different angles on the same sport, from tactics to the business side to statistics, sit under one partnership. For the people making them, it means more work in front of and behind the camera, from producers and researchers to editors who turn long conversations into clips.
Sky Sports and 1071 Media have not, so far, given a start date or release schedule for the three shows. Anyone wanting to find them will need to watch Sky Sports' YouTube channel or listen to the podcast feeds once they go live.
