Kicking off the football season with Sky Sports’ Gary Hughes

It may feel like the World Cup wasn’t that long ago, but domestic football is already back. 

The EFL has begun, the Premier League is back this weekend, and the WSL will return in a couple of weeks. For Sky Sports’ director of football Gary Hughes, that means it is once again “Sky Sports’ biggest ever season,” which he admits, “We said it last year, and we’re saying it again, and we’ll say it actually next season as well.” 

The broadcaster has brought in a number of new tech features for 2026/27, including expanding Multiview so that viewers can now choose up to four Sky Sports events to watch at once, rather than them being editorially chosen. This is after what Hughes describes as a popular debut for the feature last season. 

In addition, there is now a Sports Hub that allows viewers to see live scores, stats, tables, schedules, short-form clips and highlights at the side of the screen while watching, an algorithmic short-form scrollable cideo experience, dedicated team pages, and more. 

This focus on digital content goes across the board, and Hughes says that a large part of the plethora of rights Sky holds goes to this end, “We’ve worked very closely with the Premier League and the Premier League clubs to maximise our access, and to humanise the players.

“We turn up at training grounds and produce really engaging content with players that players enjoy, and that we know will potentially attract a younger audience and do well on YouTube. We can tease that within our linear coverage, but absolutely a lot of that access that we get through our linear rights lives on YouTube.” 

The broadcaster will also continue to work with creators on shows such as Scenes and elsewhere. 

However, live is still where the full value is, and Hughes sees this as where Sky stands out. After a summer of talk around the likes of Goalhanger’s The Rest Is Football going to Netflix and Gary Neville’s The Overlap moving on to Disney+, Hughes isn’t worried about that competition, “They can’t replicate the live appointment to view, high stakes, unpredictable drama of sport.”

For a number of Sky Sports’ pundits, though, the digital space appears to be becoming a big part of their careers. Notably for the likes of Gary Neville and Micah Richards, who are now visible on rival streamers as a result of those deals. 

Hughes said, “It’s an interesting space, and there’s been a lot of noise about this recently. From my perspective and Sky Sports’ perspective, we just need to concentrate on ourselves. We are the biggest sports broadcaster in the UK and Ireland. Our reach is phenomenal. It’s way bigger than the reach of [Goalhanger and The Overlap]. Just on Instagram, for example, we’ve got 13.4 million subscribers on the Sky Sports account. Those guys have got, I think, the actual channels and the individuals of the main protagonists have got five million between them. So we outreach them.”

Rather than fret over the chance for competition, it is more the possibility it could take away from Sky’s coverage that Hughes notes, “I do feel there’s a little bit of overexposure and saturation potentially, whereby if these voices are heard too much, it could become too much.”

The broadcaster will always pursue what is beneficial for itself in the area, Hughes says, “Like in football, there’s no player bigger than a club and I don’t think there’s any pundit or presenter bigger than a broadcaster. That’s been proven by some of the decisions that companies have made. We understand that that people have ambitions to get in and around that environment and we’ll manage it accordingly.”

Away from the studio, Sky Sports is also hoping to continue its work to grow women’s football this season, working with stakeholders to improve the matchday experience at stadiums and bring in bigger crowds. 

Hughes revealed, “We’re as close to the WSL and clubs as we ever have been in conversations around how we help grow the sport,” and that, “Our research is telling us a lot of our customers do watch WSL, whereas the WSL, I think that they feel it’s a slightly different audience. So we’re working in partnership to try to fully understand who the WSL fan is.”

He continued, “We’ve listened to the clubs is around matchday attendance. It’s massively important for them to get people through the turnstiles, to buy food and beverages, to go to the shop, to buy merch. It all helps the growth and income of the club. We’ve sort of worked with the clubs on a variety of different kick-off times. We won’t have all the games kicking off at 12 o’clock this season.”

This will see more games on Sunday afternoons, and Firday evenings could be a new slot, “We think that’s an opportunity to attract a slightly younger audience and more families at 7pm.”

It will be another busy season of football for Sky Sports, but as Hughes admitted at the top - when isn’t it?