Gary Neville has never been accused of lacking ambition.
After a playing career spent chasing trophies with Manchester United and compiling international caps with England, the 51-year-old has since built a successful business portfolio and established himself as one of English football’s most distinctive broadcasters.
This drive also saw him set up his YouTube channel The Overlap five years ago, and with the product evolving to now include a daily podcast, Neville is proving that he has taken his competitive instincts from the pitch to the boardroom.
Neville on his ambitions for The Overlap
When he launched The Overlap in 2021, Neville had a clear idea of where he wanted it to go.
“When we started five years ago, I did say that I felt I wanted it to be the biggest non-live independent football channel,” Neville tells FourFourTwo.
“But that’s just a statement. You have to have ambition, you have to believe in it, you have to take risks and you have to be entrepreneurial. You have to bring people on the journey with you, and you have to bring partners and stakeholders. We’ve done that, but I don’t ever take that for granted.”
In doing this, Neville has brought the same approach that served him so well during his playing days.
“Playing football, it’s a fight every single day to win, to be the best that you can be and I think it’s still like that when you’re doing this,” he continues.
“We’ve known for two years that we wanted to bring out a daily podcast, but what really hit us was that we recorded Stick To Football on a Wednesday, it goes out on a Thursday, then on the Monday at 10am, Ruben Amorim got sacked and we weren’t on for 10 days. I thought ‘That doesn’t feel right, we should be on’.
“When we’re on, we’re good at talking about things like that, but we’d never do ‘an emergency show’ that’s not scheduled. The daily show allows us to be more reactive, the line-ups are incredible and we’ve been very excited about it. From day one, whether it’s been the guests or the hosts, we’ve wanted to operate at a high standard and have a high bar for ourselves.”
Just like that, our time with the ever busy Neville is up, and he’s ready to head off and attack the next part of his day. We can’t help but ask one final question though, before he goes.
One of the recent things Neville squeezed into his busy diary was a Q&A with the band James, at the premiere of their new documentary. What’s his favourite James song, FFT asks?
“Getting Away With It,” Neville says. “Because that’s what I’ve been doing for all these years.” The answer is accompanied by a self-deprecating smile. Then like that, he’s off.
