Jamie Vardy will front a new Bundesliga watch-along channel in the UK and Ireland next season, while Mark Goldbridge’s That’s Football is back for another run of Friday-night streams. Bundesliga Media is widening its creator-led coverage for 2026-27, and the plan is built around names that already bring their own audiences with them.

Vardy's new channel

The league has announced that Jamie Vardy's Having a Party will lead live broadcasts on seven Bundesliga Friday night matches. The first of those is Bayern München vs VfB Stuttgart on Friday 28 August.

That is a fairly clear sign of what Bundesliga Media wants here. It is not just adding another viewing option, it is handing a premium slot to a creator-style format that it believes can pull in younger viewers and make the league feel closer to the audience.

Bundesliga Media said creator-led broadcasts were first made regularly available in the UK and Ireland in 2025. It also said those broadcasts helped it reach younger viewers, with 54% of live match viewers aged between 13 and 34.

Rick Murray, CEO of Workerbee, said: "Fans don’t just want to watch football anymore, they want to experience it with the people they already know and trust," while Peer Naubert, chief commercial officer of Bundesliga Media, added that "our job is to understand each market, work with the right partners and build a distribution model around how fans actually consume football there."

Goldbridge stays in the plan

That’s Football is returning for 15 Friday night Bundesliga matches in 2026-27, starting on Matchday 3, 11 September at 19:30 BST with Union Berlin vs FC Schalke 04. Goldbridge said: "It's fantastic to be partnering up with the Bundesliga once again for the new season"

His channel has more than 1.5 million subscribers, so the renewal gives the Bundesliga another route into a large built-in audience rather than relying only on standard broadcast packaging.

The two deals sit in the same lane. Vardy gets seven matches, Goldbridge gets 15, and the league is clearly treating creator-led coverage as something more than an experiment. The opening weekend piece is already set with Bayern München and VfB Stuttgart, and That’s Football begins its run on 11 September.

Written by Jack Mercer with AI-assisted research, cross-checked against 2 outlets. How we work →