What the Murrays’ YouTube launch signals for sports rights holders

One of the biggest stories in tennis is happening off the court. Andy and Jamie Murray are the latest athletes to take the plunge from athlete to content creator, launching a joint YouTube channel that aims to bring tennis to a wider audience through their own lens. 

A new model for athlete IP

The Set, produced by Prodigy Studios, the team behind Gary Neville’s The Overlap and The Switch, is in partnership with IMG Tennis, a division of WME Sports. The channel will draw on archive footage from ATP Media, the All-England Lawn Tennis Club and the Lawn Tennis Association to relive iconic tennis moments, with the Murrays also set to get access to showcase players and stories during tournaments including Wimbledon.

IMG Tennis and Prodigy Studios’ involvement means this a properly resourced media business built around two athletes as the entry point. The channel functions like a media property with its own commissioning logic, distribution strategy and, eventually, its own revenue lines. For rights holders watching from the sidelines, it’s a live example of what athlete-fronted IP looks like when it’s built with the same rigour as a broadcast commission.

Archive vaults are unlocking a revenue line

The involvement of ATP Media, the AELTC and the LTA signals that tennis’ own rights holders are actively leaning into athlete-led, creator-style content as a legitimate extension of their media strategy. It’s a pattern we’re seeing more of, with federations and rights holders turning their archives, access and IP into fan-facing content that drives engagement and commercial return rather than just brand awareness. The Murrays’ access to showcase players and stories during tournaments is effectively a content and distribution partnership dressed up as a YouTube channel. 

This is the part rights holders should be paying closest attention to. For decades, archive footage sat in vaults as a defensive asset, protected, licensed sparingly, and rarely built into a proactive content strategy. What The Set represents is a shift in how that footage is valued: not as a library to be guarded, but as raw material for storytelling that can be repackaged and monetised on a platform where the audience already lives. Handing a duo like the Murrays real-time access during Wimbledon itself suggests rights holders are willing to give athlete-led channels a level of proximity and access that legacy broadcasters, bound by rigid rights, simply can’t offer. If ATP Media, the AELTC and the LTA see returns here, expect other federations to start asking why their own archives are still sitting idle.

That access cuts both ways, though, and it’s worth being honest about what it does to the channel’s identity. The moment the AELTC, the LTA and ATP Media are supplying archive footage and real-time tournament access, The Set is operating inside those bodies’ editorial and commercial permissions, not outside them. That’s a materially different arrangement to a channel like cricketer Kevin Pietersen’s, which leans purely on personality and guest chemistry with no institutional footage to lean on. It’s tempting to read that as a dilution, athlete content with a federation’s fingerprints on it rather than a personal project. The more useful read is that The Set sits in a category that doesn’t have a name yet: athlete-anchored, rights-holder-enabled. The Murrays are still the editorial voice and the reason the deal exists at all; AELTC didn’t build this and hand it to them; they built it and AELTC opened the vault. A pure vlog doesn’t get archive access or tournament proximity, and a pure federation channel doesn’t get the trust and reach an athlete brings. 

The blueprint rights holders should be watching

It’s yet another example of a star departing legacy broadcast media in favour of a platform built for individuality and commercial opportunity. Since retiring in 2024, Andy has swapped the court for the course, sharpening his golf game, a sport that has embraced the YouTube creator space and carved out real territory on the platform. The Murrays have clearly taken notice. “I am a big fan of the YouTube content that sports stars like Bryson DeChambeau and Kevin Pietersen are creating and have thought for a long time that there is space in tennis for something similar,” Andy said. DeChambeau, one of the platform’s biggest sporting creators, has amassed over 2.7 million subscribers off the back of that same playbook. Pietersen on the other hand, has created a channel that has amassed 700,000 subscribers in the 8 months it has been active, which is also run by Prodigy Studios, and features a very similar content strategy and guest roster.

The timing of the channel’s unveiling is both strategic and daring. Launching during Wimbledon is smart from an exposure and interest standpoint, and it’s also a statement of intent to legacy media outlets that the Murrays are here to disrupt the space and own their voice. 

Ultimately, the Murray brothers have strong teams behind them, and the long-term ambition is to expand The Set into podcasts and sponsor-led opportunities, a roadmap that will look very familiar to anyone who’s built commercial strategy around fan engagement platforms. They’ve already posted their first video alongside YouTube star KSI, “Can We Turn KSI into a Pro Tennis Player?”, which pulled in 662,000 views in its first 9 days, and a golf-creator Bryson DeChambeau-esc coded long-form video with tennis star Casper Ruud that leans into Andy’s love of golf on the platform, with 400,000 views in the first 3 days. It’s an early signal that this career shift is being taken seriously, and that they’re bringing in the big names from day one to maximise exposure and reach.

Put those numbers next to The Overlap’s own launch and the comparison is instructive. When Gary Neville’s channel broke through in 2021, it took a genuine scoop, Harry Kane opening up about his Tottenham future, to get there: the clip alone did 1.2 million views, and the story was big enough to syndicate onto Sky Sports News and make the back pages. It took several episodes and a real news moment for The Overlap to prove the model worked. The Set doesn’t have that luxury of a slow burn, and it doesn’t need one. Hitting six-figure numbers on video one and two, without a scoop attached, says less about virality and more about what a ready-made format and rights-holder access can do to compress the usual channel-building curve. 

For rights holders across sport, The Set isn’t just a curiosity to observe from a distance, it’s a working template for what happens when archive, access and athlete equity are combined under one commercial roof. 

Gabriel Kennedy is a channel manager at Brave Bison