'It was a massive gamble for us, but within the first couple of weeks I could see it was working' Gary Neville reveals Stick To Football’s secret sauce

Gary Neville
Gary Neville has built Stick to Football into an empire (Image credit: Getty Images)
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You can barely avoid Stick To Football if you're at all interested in football these days.

The YouTube show, fronted by Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Jamie Carragher, Ian Wright and Jill Scott - sometimes with guests filling in or joining the studio - has become the go-to source of punditry wisdom and football banter.

But as the show's founder, Neville admits he was not certain it would work before a proof of concept episode proved to be a hit.

Neville told FourFourTwo: "Initially [The Overlap] was just me for two years. I was interviewing people and got to a point where I thought ‘I’m a bit of a busy fool here, I’m just wandering around talking to people’.

"I thought I’d run out of guests and I’d get bored. I get bored easily.

Gary Neville and Paul Scholes

Gary Neville has not been short on guests, as it turns out (Image credit: Getty Images)

"But we did something before one of the tournaments, with a few of us round a table – I thought it worked well and it grew from there.

“There are times you have to do things remotely, but generally I always think you’re better off being in the room with people, then you can see their faces and their excitement.

“I want five people sat around the bar, as if it’s almost like a pub after a match, and I just want us to have a chat.

“Five people shouldn’t really work, people would say it’s too many, but the one thing I was insistent upon was it would be five people and who they’d be.

“Getting them all together and to agree was difficult. It took time, but we did it.

Gary Neville and Roy Keane

Gary Neville knew who he wanted for Stick to Football (Image credit: Getty Images)

"I was so nervous before the first recording, thinking ‘How’s this going to go?’ It was a massive gamble for us, but within the first couple of weeks I could see it was working.

"After we did the David Beckham episode, the first guest episode, I thought ‘This works’.

“It’s informal, it’s authentic, we’re just having a conversation, there’s no real order to it, which is what I wanted. I just want to Stick to Football to be free – you press record, press stop, and everything in between is fair game.

"If someone walks in with a pot of tea, if someone walks in to do someone’s makeup or the sound engineer walks in, we just keep going.

"We don’t stop; everything’s filmed. There’s a team in this room delivering this programme, and we just went for it from day one.”

Steven Chicken

Steven Chicken has been working as a football writer since 2009, taking in stints with Football365 and the Huddersfield Examiner. Steven still covers Huddersfield Town home and away for his own publication, WeAreTerriers.com. Steven is a two-time nominee for Regional Journalist of the Year at the prestigious British Sports Journalism Awards, making the shortlist in 2020 and 2023.

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