Two Garys, two deals, one playbook
The talent owns the audience now. Plus Ligue 1+ secures the World Cup, Big Tech report cards and measurement's hot mess.
⚽ Ligue 1+ crashes the World Cup party
Ligue 1+, the French football league’s own streaming platform, is said to have secured rights to broadcast all 104 matches of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The deal with FIFA is worth nearly €20 million and still needs council approval. M6 remains the free-to-air home for 54 of those matches. Guess who was M6’s last CEO? Ligue 1’s CEO Nicolas de Tavernost…
Just one day earlier, a Paris court ordered BeIN Sports to pay LFP Media over €14 million in unpaid fees. BeIN used to be the Pay TV home for World Cup coverage in France. Now the league is taking that slot for itself.
The strategic logic is simple: Ligue 1+ needs content when Ligue 1 stops. A World Cup fills the summer void when the domestic season goes dark. It keeps subscribers paying through June and July instead of churning until August.
This is the LFP playing distributor, not just rights holder. Adding the World Cup signals ambition (need?) beyond domestic football. Whether the platform can handle the traffic and subscribers stick around once the World Cup ends is the next test.
📑 The Creator Bill of rights
This week on The Media Odyssey Podcast, we were lucky to host Shira Lazar, founder of What’s Trending and Creators for Mental Health.
Essential listening (and reading) for anyone who works with creators, hires them or is one. Grab the report here.
Listen and/or watch 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.
📊 Grading Big Tech’s report cards
Evan Shapiro and I broke down earnings from Apple, Meta and Microsoft live this week. Same week, similar numbers, wildly different market reactions.
Apple’s entire quarter came down to one word: iPhone. Best year since 2021, first growth in four years. But when 52% of your revenue still comes from phone sales, is that innovation or dependence?
Microsoft posted 60% net income growth in Q4 and got punished. Meta’s net income dropped 3% for the year and got applauded. Zuckerberg may just be a better salesman than Nadella.
We also got into the YouTube vs BARB drama, Comcast losing 700,000 broadband subscribers and why Reality Labs burning $6 billion feels like a chapter that’s finally closing.
Catch the replay 👉🏻 APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | DEEZER with more platforms here.
Join us live on February 5th at 2pm CET for our next earnings session with Google and Disney+ happening on LinkedIn or YouTube, then the episode will be released across audio platforms.
📺 Who gets the ad money in 2026?
Last week, I hosted a panel in London with four advertising experts to answer a question that’s been nagging at me: what does the ad market actually look like for us this year?
The top line looks stable. The reality underneath? 80 to 90% of all new advertising money flows into just four companies; agency land is messier than the headlines suggest; AI is already reshaping media buying in ways that could either democratise access or lock smaller publishers out entirely.
📏 YouTube vs BARB: the measurement wall goes up
Google sent cease-and-desist letters to BARB (the UK’s TV measurement body) and Kantar Media, forcing them to halt a product launched last summer that aimed to measure YouTube viewing in a way comparable to television. The dispute centered on audio-matching technology used to detect when YouTube channels were being viewed.
On the surface, this looks like a narrow fight about methodology and API terms. Underneath, it exposes something more structural: digital platforms have no incentive to make their metrics comparable to anyone else’s.
Jenny Bullis, CEO of Dentsu Media’s UK and Ireland, at the Media Research Conference in December 2024, “Measurement is a hot mess” quote is more relevant than ever.
Measurement across advertising is becoming more fragmented, not less. Each major platform developed its own proprietary framework for tracking and attributing performance.
The irony is sharp. YouTube spent 2025 telling advertisers it deserves TV money because it is TV. Now it is blocking the one tool that could prove (or disprove) that claim on TV’s terms. What is perfect? Surely not but the BARB tool had the merit of going at the channel level and not simply at the platform one (where big numbers don’t tell the whole story).
What happens next? Probably nothing that changes the dynamic. Marketers say they want unified measurement but they also keep feeding budgets into black-box systems where ease of use means everything.
For European broadcasters, it’s another proof that they should not expect big tech to play fair on measurement and another incentive to make their inventory available to big tech’s buyers: SMEs.
P.S.: check out my favourite pieces from fellow media commentators on this topic: Business of TV, Omar Oakes, Madison & Wall, yep they’re all on Substack.
🎙️ When podcasters become media moguls
Two deals, same week, same playbook. Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger (home of “The Rest Is...” podcast franchise) just took minority investment from Peter Chernin’s TCG. Gary Neville’s The Overlap sold a majority stake to UK radio giant Global.
Both companies were built by ex-footballers turned pundits. Both started as passion projects, not business plans. Both grew audiences that legacy media struggles to reach. Goalhanger’s “The Rest Is History” dominates US podcast charts. The Overlap pulled 2.2 billion views across platforms last year and holds UK Bundesliga streaming rights on YouTube.
Now both are taking institutional money to do the same thing: expand into TV, film, live events and new formats. Goalhanger already has a Netflix deal for a daily World Cup show hosted by Lineker. The Overlap wants to become a “world-leading football and sports media platform.”
Here is what podcasts have become: IP incubators. The microphone is now the cheapest way to build an audience, test ideas and prove demand before spending real production money. Investors are betting that a loyal podcast following converts better than traditional development pipelines.
The message to broadcasters is uncomfortable. The talent that used to sit on your sofas now owns the audience relationship and they might not be coming back.
🗳️ Poll time
That’s it for today. Enjoy your weekend and see you on Tuesday for a Deep Dive edition of Streaming Made Easy Premium.