Jude Bellingham’s YouTube Documentary Is The Future Of Player Content
Birmingham City was mocked in 2020 for retiring Jude Bellingham's Number 22 shirt when he left the club for Borussia Dortmund aged 17. But Birmingham's fans will feel some joy in Bellingham becoming bigger than local rivals Aston Villa.
On YouTube anyway.
Aston Villa's YouTube channel has 595,000 subscribers, but Jude Bellingham, whose channel currently only has 11 videos and has only been releasing content for around two weeks, already has 683,000 subscribers.
That's more subscribers than all but eight Premier League clubs.
Bellingham is using the channel to release a documentary about his first season at Real Madrid.
"Out of the Floodlights" follows the format of other autobiographical documentaries like the recent Netflix one on David Beckham, with an interview of Bellingham combined with footage from matches, award shows and home videos from his childhood.
The first episode, which sees him leave Borussia Dortmund and practice interview questions on the plane with his brother Jobe, has already racked up more than 2 million views.
Many documentaries look back on a player's career after they have retired, not when they are only 21 years old.
Making this documentary now gives fans an insight into the difficulties faced by young sports stars, such as how Bellingham's dad lives in the North East of England to support Jobe in his soccer career at EFL Championship side Sunderland (of "Sunderland 'Til I Die fame") while his mom lives with him in Spain, with Jobe joking that if Jude could cook and drive, their mum could live with him in England instead.
Bellingham is not the first soccer star to launch a YouTube channel; Cristiano Ronaldo's recently launched channel already eclipses every soccer club in the world with 62.8 million subscribers. Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe also have more than a million subscribers.
But Bellingham could be at the forefront of a trend of elite soccer players at the peak of their careers taking control of their own behind-the-scenes content.
Soccer players say they're overworked with a match calendar of two games a week. But that still leaves five days that could be filled with other content.
The success of shows like Formula One's "Drive to Survive" have shown that sports fans want to see what happens behind-the-scenes, and while many soccer clubs have upped their YouTube offerings in the past couple of years, there's still plenty of space for players to engage with their fans directly.
With more and more fans following players rather than clubs, there is even more incentive for players to produce such content, and the power dynamic between clubs and players is shifting to give players more control over their media and image rights.
His channel might have been launched after Ronaldo's, but Bellingham's documentary has been in the making since the start of last season, and was likely on his team's mind when negotiating his contract with Real Madrid.
His first season at Real Madrid was a resounding success; he won the UEFA Champions League and was named LaLiga's Player of the Season. Off the pitch, Bellingham's team had the foresight to capitalize on this and build "Brand Bellingham."
Given the reach Bellingham's YouTube channel has seen already, other soccer stars could follow suit with their own documentaries in the coming seasons.
