Fan TV: a revolution or just a vehicle for venting attention-grabbing fury?Channels such as Arsenal Fan TV claim they give supporters the chance to have their say but are viewers just hoping to watch a car-crash moment?Arsenal Fan TV has proved a big success, as supporters are given the chance to air their grievances. Photograph: Arsenal Fan TV
It was freezing outside the Emirates Stadium but that had not stopped the crowd. Small children were hoisted on the shoulders of their parents and one adult was holding a sign that read “#no bad energy”. All in all there must have been at least 200 people craning to hear a chartered accountant share his views on a hum-drum victory against Hull City. And they were all standing in absolute silence.
This was the scene as Arsenal Fan TV recorded their latest instalment on Saturday. 22 latest instalments, to be accurate, each filmed, cut and uploaded to YouTube by the channel’s founder, Robbie Lyle. Now often described as “infamous”, Arsenal Fan TV is just the most prominent example of a genre of home-made video content that claims to give overdue exposure to the views of long‑suffering supporters. Are they a revolution in the making?
A popular Arsenal Fan video can get 300,000-500,000 views on YouTube. Alongside Lyle it has a cast of characters who make regular appearances, each with individual trademark routines. Moh Haider, the accountant, likes to talk about the club’s transfer dealings and, in particular, its “net spend”. Mr DT works himself into apoplexy over Arsène Wenger’s refusal to step down as manager and has recently launched his own YouTube channel. Ty, meanwhile, is a Wenger apologist, dressed head to toe in club merchandise.
If Arsenal Fan TV needed extra notoriety, it gained it last week when Gary Neville observed a typically heated post‑match rant after the Gunners’ capitulation to Chelsea and described it as “embarrassing”. Lyle offered him the chance to discuss the matter further and on Monday Neville sat down with Lyle, DT and others for an interview in the Sky Sports studios. Mr DT later said of the exchange: “I got my point across big time.”
Lyle started his channel four years ago and 18 months ago took it on full‑time. He acknowledges its reputation as a place of heated opinions but says he is just airing supporters’ real feelings. “Quite simply our aim is to give fans a voice,” he says. “When I started it off you would never ever hear from fans. You’d hear from pundits, ex-players, you guys in the media. You’d never hear from the guys who spend their hard-earned money, emotions and time going to see games.”
Strong opinions come with the territory, he says. “You have to be an honest channel. If you’re filming when everybody is happy and it’s great, you’ve also got to film when you have a bad loss. You can’t hide away because then you become like the club, putting a brave face on everything.”
Lyle says he never set out to find the characters who regularly appear on his channel, that they would come to him (and indeed they were all in attendance after Hull). “If it gets to that stage where people are acting, then I wouldn’t want that,” he says. “Some of them get accused of that, because people only highlight the rants but, if you take a person like DT and you look over the past six weeks, you’ll see he’s praising Wenger. People who follow us will know that we’re pretty fair. We’re not always angry. We’re not always calling for Wenger’s head.”
In the past few years there has been an explosion in Fan TV but imitating Lyle’s success has proved difficult. Fremantle Media, the company better known for making QI, launched half a dozen of them but, while it has had its success with its Manchester United offering, Full Time Devils, its Chelsea offering has not posted anything for two months. Other channels have stopped filming interviews after matches altogether. The most common mode of fan channel content is now two men discussing the weekend’s game from a sofa. Questions remain over whether fan channels are viable businesses or just the occasional source of viral content.
Redmen TV market themselves as the place to ‘uncensored’ Liverpool FC content.
“My suspicion is that a lot of people who are watching Arsenal Fan TV and Full Time Devils aren’t necessarily fans of those clubs or watching for depth of analysis but for car crash moments,” says Lawrence Tallis, the creative director of Big Balls Films, who run the successful generalist football channel Copa 90. “As a sole trader with no overheads you could survive on YouTube but it’s more difficult to make a business out of it. Robbie is really smart.”
Fickle online audiences attracted only to attention grabbing content are not unique to fan channels. But it does place large demands on those people who do pursue it seriously. An average matchday for Lyle will not end until after 10pm and the rest of the week is taken up with finding angles for new videos, then promoting them relentlessly on social media.
Liam Waddington, who under the username Vizeh runs a Burnley fan channel, will leave his student digs in Newcastle at 5.30am on a matchday in order to leave enough time to make his videos which, on a good day, will get 10,000 YouTube views. He says he is less providing a voice for the fan than connecting with supporters who cannot make it to the game. “I’ve been learning what people want and why they watch,” he says. “They might watch because they want to see the atmosphere in the ground or perhaps for highlights.”
Waddington films his matchday experience, the reaction of people around him and, sometimes, the odd bit of highlights captured on his phone. “I got the [Robbie] Brady free‑kick [against Chelsea] and I can’t wait to upload it,” he says. “I’m trying to bring first person perspective of being in the game to Burnley fans who can’t get there. My videos give them a way to experience it.” Waddington hopes that one day his videos might get him a job at the club, as part of the Burnley media team.
Before arranging his interview with Neville, Lyle posted a video calling for a revolution in fan channels, with every club finding its own Mr DT to speak truth to power. The suspicion remains that, outside the hothouse atmosphere of clubs like Arsenal, there are not the audiences to sustain such endeavours, no matter how passionate the creators. But as Tallis observes, a genie is now out of the bottle. “Fans do need to be heard and can be heard without mainstream broadcast approval,” he says.
“We’ve been through a long period of fans being squeezed out by either organising bodies or clubs and the time where you could get away with that has passed.”
Guardian
