Brands will spend fortunes on this summer’s World Cup but they should heed the BBC’s warning when scrapping Football Focus, writes Amar Singh. I grew up with Football Focus. Saturday lunchtime, Bob Wilson in a grey suit, grainy footage of some Division Two ground in the rain. It was the
Amar Singh
Friday 01 May 2026 3:00 pm | Updated: Thursday 30 April 2026 5:03 pm
Brands will spend fortunes on this summer’s World Cup but they should heed the BBC’s warning when scrapping Football Focus, writes Amar Singh.
I grew up with Football Focus. Saturday lunchtime, Bob Wilson in a grey suit, grainy footage of some Division Two ground in the rain. It was the traditional seat-warmer for a weekend of football.
Last week, the BBC axed the magazine-style show after 52 years. The official explanation cited “changing audience behaviours” and the need to “reach fans wherever they are.” Buried inside that institutional language is a message that every brand, sponsor and rights holder planning their World Cup summer needs to hear.
The cancellation of Football Focus is a signal which the sponsorship industry should be paying attention to.
Audience is bigger than ever but it’s migrated
It would be convenient to blame budget cuts. The BBC needs to find £500m in savings over two years and a 52-year-old Saturday lunchtime programme was always going to struggle to justify itself in that context. But that lets everyone off the hook.
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I have spent more than a decade in sports marketing, including two years running global football strategy for Budweiser across the Premier League, LaLiga and Lionel Messi partnerships. In that time I have sat in a lot of rooms where brands obsess over their broadcast presence while their target audience has migrated somewhere else entirely.
The fact is, football fans have never been more engaged. Research by insights specialists Dentsu Sports Analytics conducted with 3,000 fans in six markets found that 78 per cent are extremely or very interested in this summer’s World Cup.
Engagement with football content is not declining. The problem for the industry is keeping pace as the audience moves.
YouTube is now the primary destination for catching up on missed matches across every age group. Under 35s are two to three times more likely than over 35s to use social platforms to follow the game.
And the finding that should stop every brand strategist in their tracks: 52 per cent of fans now trust creator match insights more than pundits on TV broadcasts.
That alone should worry anyone building their strategy around broadcast-first thinking when more than half of football fans trust someone with a ring light and a YouTube channel over a former professional footballer sitting behind a desk.
The institutional Football Focus was not axed because of a so-called woke rebrand, it was because its core audience – the fan who sat down at midday on Saturday for considered analysis – has fragmented beyond recovery.
Established figures saw this coming
The strongest indication of this shift is what established voices have started doing in response.
The Overlap, Gary Neville’s media company, recently acquired the YouTuber Mark Goldbridge’s That’s Football – one of the most followed fan channels in UK football. The people who built their profile through traditional punditry are now buying creator culture rather than competing with it.
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Look at what they are making. Neville’s Stick to Football mimics the aesthetic fan channels pioneered – banter, loose conversation, impassioned views, no autocue (unless Neville is reading one of his Huel ads). Gary Lineker’s The Rest is Football is formulated to sound like three mates catching up to chat footy rather than three pundits on a set. The casualness is the point.
This is not punditry and it is certainly not journalism. It is something newer and harder to categorise: content built for an audience that wants to feel something alongside someone they trust, rather than be informed by someone with authority.
The BBC saw this coming. Alex Kay-Jelski, head of BBC Sport and someone with a strong track record for growing digital audiences at The Athletic and The Times, said the decision to axe Football Focus reflected “the continued shift in how audiences engage with football.” That’s a frank admission that the format had been left behind by the people it was built to serve.
Football Focus is the institutional version of the same reckoning Neville and Lineker navigated by reinventing themselves. Unfortunately the BBC could not reinvent a 52-year-old format fast enough.
What brands must do before World Cup starts
The 2026 World Cup will generate more sponsorship spend than any event in the history of sport. Official Fifa partners alone will commit hundreds of millions to pitchside LEDs, broadcast spots and activation rights negotiated over years.
A lot of that money will reach an audience with at least one eye on another screen.
Seventy-three per cent of fans say they will follow content creators at the tournament. In the United States, one of three host nations, that rises to 85 per cent. More tellingly, 57 per cent say they will keep following the creators they discover during the World Cup long after the final whistle. This tournament is a creator acquisition moment on a scale the industry has never seen before.
The mistake brands keep making is investing heavily in official status without extending that investment into reaching the right audiences. The Football Focus cancellation is the clearest possible signal that the media landscape has shifted, permanently, toward digital and creator-led content.
The response must be to rebalance priorities rather than abandon broadcast. To build genuine partnerships with creators whose audiences already trust them. To think less about tentpole moments and more about sustained presence – content that earns a place in the daily habits of football fans rather than interrupting them once and disappearing.
Dan Walker, who hosted the show for 12 years, called it “disappointing that there isn’t space for a show that has meant so much to so many people for so many years.”
He is wrong that it is disappointing. There is no space because the fans moved on while the show stayed where it was. Football Focus was well made, well presented and genuinely loved but none of that could save it.
The World Cup this summer will be the most watched, most talked about, most created-around sporting event in history. For every brand spending money on it, the enduring question is whether you are spending your money where the fans actually are.
Amar Singh is SVP, Content and Creative for MKTG Sports + Entertainment. He writes and podcasts about sports marketing, content and culture at https://thesportsmarketeer.substack
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