Fifa, football’s world governing body, launched an official channel on video-sharing website YouTube.
The channel will feature footage from recent Fifa competitions such as the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and the 2011 Women’s World Cup in Germany, as well as player profiles, documentaries and the Fifa Futbol Mundial magazine show. The channel will also carry live streamed coverage of Fifa media events.
“Fifa is keen to engage with football fans beyond our competitions by sharing our rich visual content with them, and for this there is no better platform in terms of reach and penetration than YouTube,” Fifa president Sepp Blatter said.
The Fifa channel launch was announced just days after the official website of Uefa, football’s European governing body, said it would feature archived video content from its competitions and coaching advice on its own YouTube channel.
Stephen Nuttall, YouTube’s senior director of sports partnerships in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said the Fifa channel launch provided “one more example that YouTube is increasingly the place for football.”
YouTube’s head of sports content, Claude Ruibal, said that the website wants to expand its portfolio of live sports content, but would not bid for live rights for properties such as the English Premier League.
“We’re not a content creator, we’re not a broadcaster, we’re not going to be a high-stakes rights bidder,” Ruibal told the Sporting Intelligence website. “But we can be a platform for more long-form sports rights, and want to be. We’re just not going to have a business model to spend £2 billion (€2.3 billion/$3.1 billion) on long-form live rights for Premier League football. It would be a wonderfully powerful attractor of viewers to our platform but we need to live within the reality of the world. How do we [instead] augment what’s there already? By potentially having a nice offering around catch-up. And another big piece of what we’re doing is everything surrounding sport – the lead-up to the event, and after the event.”
Ruibal added that YouTube might be interested in showing clips of Premier League games.
“If we could partner on something on that [Premier League clips], on catch-up content soon after the event, then that’s something we could be good at,” he added.