Mark Goldbridge is set to co-present Stick to United with Wayne Rooney after Disney+ secured the rights to The Overlap’s podcast content in a multimillion pound deal. The move gives Disney+ a fresh football line while leaving the shows on YouTube, so the audience does not have to choose one platform over the other.
50 episodes with Wayne Rooney
50 episodes of Stick to United with Wayne Rooney will be commissioned this season, with Goldbridge alongside Wayne Rooney on the new programme. Rooney is joining The Overlap stable on a permanent basis after previously making guest appearances, which turns a recurring booking into a fixed part of the line-up.
40 episodes of Stick to Football will also run this season, with Gary Neville, Jamie Carragher, Jill Scott, Ian Wright and Roy Keane continuing in that format. Disney+ will add six additional episodes of the show for a limited time before they are released on YouTube, a split that keeps the platform’s brand in the mix without pulling the audience away from the channel that built it.
YouTube stays in play
The Overlap will keep its intellectual property rights, so Disney+ is paying for access and distribution rather than taking ownership of the brand itself. That structure lets the company widen reach while preserving the channel’s existing identity, which is the part that makes this deal harder to read as a simple platform takeover.
The Overlap said this year that it is attracting 38m monthly views on YouTube after achieving 2.2bn views across all platforms in 2025, numbers that explain why a major streamer would want in without forcing the content off its home base. Global bought a majority stake in The Overlap last January, and Disney+’s investment follows a similar deal announced last month involving Netflix and Goalhanger production company.
Netflix pressure in football
The Rest is Football, with Alan Shearer and Micah Richards, will be available on Netflix for the next two seasons, and it appeared in Netflix’s daily top 10 charts on every day of its 40-day run of daily episodes filmed during the World Cup. It also drew more than 7m monthly streams for its content alone last season, which sets the bar Disney+ is now answering in football podcast rights.
Gary Neville said, “We’re immensely proud to be partnering with Disney+” and added, “It’s a partnership that expands our reach without compromising our identity.” He also said, “What’s exciting is that we’re not changing who we are,” and, “Our community will continue to enjoy our content in exactly the way they always have through YouTube, while at the same time Disney+’s incredible global streaming audience will now be able to discover and enjoy it too.”
