PEOPLE younger than you – yes, you reading this – prefer to watch YouTube and TikTok rather than “normal TV”.

This is why Gary Lineker (above) leaving the presenting duties on Match of the Day last season may have looked like a noble stand about freedom of expression, but was far more likely a cool business decision. The modern magic pathway is to get famous on an established channel and then break away to run things yourself on lucrative podcasts and social media projects with a ready-made personal audience. Truth is, people are engaging more on the latter than staying in on a Saturday night to watch Danny Murphy explain to Kelly Cates what he does and doesn’t like to see.

Lineker’s Goalhanger company has outsmarted the firm which gave him his first media break.
But where does this end? Well, we’ve now seen Nicky Butt start a podcast. Nobody really thinks of him as one of the Manchester United golden age stars, but I suppose he was milling around on the premises at the time. His contribution so far has included the sparkling insight that, if he were still playing, he’d “take a throw-in and follow through right on his head”, referring to how much Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta annoys him by being animated on the touchline. This is apparently the unfiltered authenticity viewers are crying out for.

It gets worse. Gary Neville has a stake in the Fananalysis company which Sky Sports now lean on to serve up “real-time” supporter opinion between matches. In other words, a fairly naked attempt to imitate the fan YouTube channels that have already siphoned off their audience.

They know people are still watching the actual game on TV – or perhaps by other means – but instead of listening to the strange blend of pundits Sky have settled on afterwards, viewers switch to social media to hear someone who sounds more like them. Someone who agrees their team should have had a penalty for an obvious handball.

When TV tries to “do” YouTube, though, it’s excruciating.

Hence the much-derided Fananalysis stunt of locking Manchester United and Manchester City fans in a box, depriving them of the match, and then wheeling them out at the end for a big reveal of screaming joy and absolute guttedy-guttedness. It’s the future of broadcasting, apparently – just with all the spontaneity carefully supervised.