An out-of-work striker turns rights holder
Jamie Vardy may have stopped playing, but he has not stopped getting involved. The former Leicester frontman has landed Bundesliga broadcast rights in the UK and Ireland, The Athletic reports. His YouTube channel, “Jamie Vardy’s Having a Party”, launched in June, will show seven German top-flight matches live and free this season.
All of them land on Friday nights. The first is tonight, Bayern Munich against Stuttgart. The channel is owned by Banijay Entertainment, which has signed a one-year deal with the Bundesliga and will handle production. Former players and other content creators will be drafted in for the broadcasts.
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A gamble that started back in 2025
The Bundesliga is no stranger to this. In 2025, it became the first major European league to hand live UK rights to content creators rather than traditional broadcasters. Last season, The Overlap and That’s Football, Mark Goldbridge’s channel, had already taken on some Friday fixtures.
Goldbridge is back this season. Vardy takes over The Overlap’s slot, while that channel shifts to content and interviews around the league. The thinking is simple: chase a younger audience in a market where the big leagues still are not showing up live.
236,000 viewers against 11,000 subscribers
The numbers show how big the gamble is. Goldbridge’s Bayern Munich against RB Leipzig broadcast pulled in 236,000 viewers last season. Vardy’s channel sits at 11,000 subscribers. That gap is the whole point: the Bundesliga is buying the player’s name, not the channel’s current reach.
At 39, Vardy is without a club after leaving Cremonese, where he scored seven goals in 29 matches last season. His climb from non-league football to the 2016 Premier League title with Leicester remains one of the most retold stories in English football. That is the star power on offer here.
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