I have noticed in the last few weeks that Arsenal Fan TV and United Stand Youtube presenters have been confronted by their own fans after games when they've been filming.
What do you think about this?
The interview below summarises the situation and articulates it from the Youtube presenters point of view
I know these channels are set up on a commercial basis to make and it might be a good career option for people who are good at speaking. You can see some of the presenters going to work for football clubs and more traditional football media but what do ordinary fans make of their influence. Are they good or bad?
I like them because I can use them to get an idea about what fans of a certain club are thinking.
However, is there a down-side to them. Are they toxic? Can they destabilise a club's fanbase to the extent that they make it very very difficult for players and manager to work? Look at Arsenal. If you watch their games, you can hear their fans screaming all kinds of abuse at their players, and their channel gets huge viewing figures. It's very influential.
I don't think there's anything wrong with them but I would like to hear opinions. I do think that they make football supporters more emboldened and volatile and influential but that is not a bad thing.
It would also be interesting to know how viable they are commercially. Are the popular fan channels making money? There's a proliferation of them.
Man Utd have loads of them:
Fulltimedevils, United Stand, United Central. Then each of their presenters have their own channels on top.
Arsenal fans are angry because most of them grew up supporting Wenger's team, saw the invincibles, Henry, Vieira etc., were sold a dream that didn't come to fruition and have now lived through 15 years of worse and worse football with no sign of light at the end of the tunnel.
At first they were angry with the owners.
Then they were angry with the players, who couldn't live up to the old players, but then more players came and went and it became impossible to believe they were all rotten.
Then they blamed Wenger. That reached a crescendo with ArseneOut banners, and AFTV became a big part of that because they gave fans a voice and entered the mainstream.
Then Wenger went and they blamed Emery.
Now Emery has gone, the players have all changed, the owners have spent some money, Wenger's out of the picture and something happened - the mainstream media and pundits started turning on the Arsenal fans, saying they were entitled and toxic.
So then the anger turned towards the people who gave the fans a platform to show off that toxicity, AFTV. People who are supposed to have profited off the misery of the last 15 years.
The problem is they will never stop being angry because they're not a good team. When AFTV goes, something new will be blamed, because they were sold a dream with the new stadium, that it would give the riches and clout to compete for titles in perpetuity, and by the time it was built, Abramovic and Mansour ended that dream and changed the footballing landscape to one where you couldn't take 5 years off resting on your laurels to finance a stadium.
This is the cause of the hate for fan tv that you're seeing. It's Arsenal turning on their own, and then because Arsenal's fan presence is so big, other fanbases are just being sheep and following suit because if the biggest fan channel of them all, AFTV is bad, so must all the others.