Europe's five big leagues on YouTube, the first 106 days of the season

01Season totals for the five leagues and the split between formats

Since 1 July the 101 channels have published 21,001 videos and collected 2.86 billion views, 61.9 million likes and 1.4 million comments, which works out at 137.0 thousand views per video and an engagement rate of 2.21%, and that is roughly 198 new football videos a day from the top five leagues alone, before national teams, broadcasters and creators are counted.

The donuts say the same thing in every league. Shorts are 54.3% of what gets published and they take 61.6% of the views and 74% of the likes, and long-form, at 37.8% of output, takes 34.6% of the views and 49.1% of the comments, so people tap a heart on a Short and write something under a long video wherever the club plays. Live is 7.95% of uploads and 3.72% of views, and in the views-per-video donut it takes 18.6%, because a few hundred streams from Barcelona, Bayern and Real Madrid pull big numbers and the other thousand or so are watched by almost nobody, which is the pattern the Bundesliga page shows in detail.

02The league-by-league table

The Premier League leads with 1.1 billion views from 4,287 videos, 653.1 million of them from 2,400 Shorts and 419.2 million from 1,700 long-form videos, and La Liga is second with 920.0 million views from 6,626 videos, the biggest output of the five by a wide margin, with 570.9 million from Shorts and 47.2 million from 703 live streams, double the live count of any other league. Together the two take 71% of all the views in the dashboard, and the Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1 share the remaining 29%, at 329.7 million, 308.6 million and 199.0 million.

Views per video is the column that reorders the leagues. The Premier League earns 258.4 thousand per upload, La Liga 139.4 thousand, the Bundesliga 105.9 thousand, Ligue 1 76.8 thousand and Serie A 71.9 thousand, so the Bundesliga gets more out of each of its 3,140 videos than Serie A gets out of 4,334, and Ligue 1, with the fewest views of the five, still beats Italy on return per video. In the Premier League the two formats are close, 253.4 thousand for long-form and 274.1 thousand for Shorts, in La Liga the same, 139.5 thousand against 152.9 thousand, and from there the gap opens, to 91.8 against 126.3 thousand in Germany, 60.2 against 87.8 thousand in Italy and 48.4 against 99.4 thousand in France, where a Short is worth twice a long video.

The duration columns run the other way from what the distribution charts further down would suggest. Serie A makes the shortest long-form videos, 7:00 on average, and the shortest Shorts, 27 seconds, and sits last on return per video, while the Bundesliga makes the longest long-form at 10:35 and Ligue 1 the longest Shorts at 39 seconds, and both earn more per upload than Italy. Length moves a channel within the band its audience sets, and the band is set by who follows the clubs, which is the thing none of these columns can show.

03Engagement rate and average duration by league

La Liga leads on engagement at 2.91%, with Ligue 1 at 2.14% and Serie A at 2.07% behind it, and the two leagues with the biggest reach per video sit at the bottom, the Bundesliga at 1.84% and the Premier League at 1.80%. My reading is the one from the Serie A page, that big Shorts reach brings in viewers who scroll past without reacting, and across five leagues the pattern holds, because the league whose average upload gets 258.4 thousand views is the league where the smallest share of those viewers does anything about it.

On duration the Bundesliga makes the longest long-form videos at 10:35, then Ligue 1 at 10:15, La Liga at 9:31, the Premier League at 8:49 and Serie A at 7:00, and the Shorts order is close to the same, Ligue 1 at 39 seconds, the Bundesliga at 36, the Premier League at 34, La Liga at 28 and Serie A at 27. Italy makes the shortest videos in both formats and Germany and France the longest, so the two leagues with the most spare time in each video are also two of the three with the least reach, which is worth reading next to the two distribution charts that come next.

04Which length of Short earns the most views

These two distribution charts count more videos than the leagues table above, roughly double, so they read as the whole set of channels the tracker follows rather than the five leagues alone, and the shares and averages are what matter here. The most common Short is 13 to 18 seconds long, with about 3,500 of them in the window, followed by the 19 to 24 second bin at about 2,800 and the 7 to 12 second bin at about 2,700, and the catalogue thins out steadily from there to under a thousand Shorts in each of the bins above 43 seconds. The views do not follow the volume. The 7 to 12 second bin alone takes close to 40% of all the Shorts views in the chart, twice the share of the 13 to 18 second bin, and the two bins under 13 seconds together hold around 43% of the views from about 17% of the Shorts.

Average views per Short makes the point without the arithmetic. A Short of six seconds or less averages about 535 thousand views, a 7 to 12 second Short about 470 thousand, and the 13 to 18 second Short that clubs make most of averages about 180 thousand, so the step from 12 to 13 seconds costs more than half the audience, and everything from 31 seconds up sits around 100 thousand or below. The 0 to 6 second bin has only about 300 videos in it, most of them from PSG and the Premier League channel, so part of that average is who made them, and the 7 to 12 second bin, with 2,700 videos from dozens of channels, is the better evidence.

If I ran a club channel I would take one thing from this chart, which is that the Short is a single moment and the clubs that have understood it, PSG with an eight-second clip at 44.1 million views and Juventus with a twelve-second backheel montage at 2.0 million, cut the moment and stop. The 25 to 30 second Short, which averages about 158 thousand, slightly more than the bins either side of it, reads like the natural length of a highlight with a build-up and a celebration, and it earns a third of what the same channel would get from the goal alone.

05Which length of long-form video earns the most views

Long-form on these channels is mostly short. About 4,900 videos in the window are between one and three minutes, 3,550 are three to five minutes and 4,350 are five to ten minutes, so around three quarters of everything in the long-form slot is under ten minutes, and the full match, the 90-minute-plus bin, has about 100 videos in it. The one to three minute clip takes roughly 40% of all the long-form views in the chart, about twice the share of the three to five minute bin and of the five to ten minute bin.

Per video the shape of the curve is the surprise. The one to three minute clip averages about 165 thousand views, the ten to fifteen minute video about 124 thousand, the fifteen to thirty minute video about 112 thousand and the three to five minute video about 110 thousand, and the five to ten minute video, the second most common shape in the catalogue, averages about 85 thousand, the lowest of any bin under an hour. A full match of 90 minutes or more averages about 63 thousand, which for a stream of a whole game on a club channel is a respectable number from a small sample.

The reading I would give a club is that the catalogue has two kinds of long-form that work, the match clip under three minutes, which is a highlight package or a goal with context and travels like a Short with a landscape frame, and the proper programme of ten minutes and up, a documentary, a full press conference, a behind-the-scenes day, which people choose to sit through. The five to ten minute video falls between the two, too long for the feed and too short to be an appointment, and it is the shape most clubs default to for a match recap. The Premier League page shows Manchester City averaging 745.2 thousand views on long-form that runs 14:25 on average, and the Bundesliga page shows Schalke at 29:08, so the clubs getting the most out of the format are already on the long side of this chart.

06Publishing cadence month by month, by league

La Liga publishes more than any other league in every month, from about 1,450 videos in July to about 2,200 in August and 2,150 in September, and the gap to the next league is around 700 videos a month. The Premier League peaked in August at about 1,550 and fell to about 1,250 in September, Serie A grew through the three months, from about 920 to 1,310 and then 1,480, so Italy overtook England in September, and the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 run in a band between 550 and 1,050 videos a month.

October is projected lower for all five leagues, which is the international break in the first half of the month, and the projection is built on 15 of 31 days, so treat it as a direction. The useful comparison is Spain against England, because La Liga publishes half as many videos again and collects 84% of the views, which says the Premier League's lead is built on what each video earns and the Spanish one on how many there are.

07Videos published per day across the five leagues

Early July runs at 100 to 150 videos a day, with a couple of weekend days near 65, and the count climbs through August to a stretch from the last week of August to the middle of September where most days are between 260 and 310, the busiest period of the season so far. The dip at the end of September and the start of October, to between 100 and 130 a day, is the October international break, and the weekend of 10 and 11 October, with the clubs back in training, bounced to about 270 and 285.

Weekends are not the busiest days. The highest single day in the window is a Saturday around 20 September at about 310, but most of the days above 280 are weekdays, because signings, press conferences and training content land Monday to Friday and the match itself is only one of the week's uploads. For a club social team the number to keep in mind is 198, which is how many other videos from the top five leagues an upload competes with on an average day, and on a busy September weekday it is more than 300.

08When the five leagues publish, by day and hour

The busiest hour of the week is midnight on Monday morning, 00:00 CET, with 326 videos in the window, and it stands alone, because the next busiest cells, Tuesday and Wednesday around noon and the late afternoons from Wednesday to Friday, are in the 200 to 260 range by the colour scale. The Monday midnight cell is Sunday night's content, the late kick-offs in Spain, Italy and France ending after 22:30 and the highlights and reaction going up as soon as the edit is done, and the Ligue 1 page traces about half of it to PSG and the French league channel.

The working day from 09:00 to 22:00 on weekdays is where almost everything else happens, with the mornings before 09:00 and the hours after 23:00 close to empty on every day. Weekend afternoons are lighter than weekday afternoons, which repeats the lesson of the previous chart, that match day is one day among seven, and the quiet slots, Sunday morning, Saturday morning, any weekday before 09:00, are open to a club with a smaller audience that wants its upload to be the only new thing in the feed for an hour.

09How concentrated the views are in each league

La Liga and Ligue 1 are the most concentrated leagues, with about 10% of their videos producing 80% of their views, the Bundesliga is at about 13%, and the Premier League and Serie A are the most evenly spread, at about 21% and 23%. In Spain and France that is one or two channels doing the work, Barcelona and Real Madrid with 58% of La Liga's views between them and PSG with 70% of Ligue 1's, so a tenth of the catalogue is mostly the output of the giants, and the other 19 or 18 channels fill the long tail.

The per-league pages show the same chart club by club, and the extremes are wider than any league figure suggests. Alavés reaches 80% of its season views with about 1% of its videos and Brentford and Brighton with about 6%, while Paderborn needs about 62% and Le Mans about 62%, and the giants sit in the middle, Barcelona at about 42%, Real Madrid at about 40%, Juventus at about 45% and Bayern at about 26%, because a channel where every video is big has no single hit to tilt the ratio. Serie A as the most evenly spread league reads well until the table above puts it last on views per video, because an even spread of a small number is still a small number.

10The 25 channels with the most days without a video

Lorient tops the list with about 90 of 106 days without a video, then Elversberg, Rayo Vallecano and Le Mans at around 86, Troyes at about 83, and a group between 73 and 78 that includes Frosinone, Ipswich, Venezia, Lecce, Napoli, Auxerre, Hull and Le Havre. Ligue 1 has nine channels in this list of 25, Serie A has eight, the Premier League four, the Bundesliga three and La Liga one, so the French and Italian long tails are the quietest in Europe, and Ipswich, Hull and Coventry publish like clubs that have not yet built a YouTube operation for this level.

Napoli at about 75 silent days and Roma at about 62 are the two names here that have no business on this chart, and Brighton at about 52 missed days has 19.6 million views and 123.6 thousand per video, so it is the one channel in the 25 that has an audience waiting and leaves it alone half the week. Every club on this list is below 10 million season views except Brighton, and the 20 biggest channels in the tracker are all absent from it, which is the whole relationship between consistency and reach in one chart.

11The videos carrying a club's season, across the five leagues

Twenty-seven videos across the five leagues pass the one-hit test this season, ten in the Premier League, ten in La Liga, three in the Bundesliga, three in Ligue 1 and one in Serie A, and the top ten by lift is Spanish by a distance. Alavés's Pero Mariano has 7.7 million views at 2,968 times the channel's median and 79% of its season, Valencia's Mestalla eclipse Short is at 1,500 times and 52%, Málaga's Pa-ra-dón at 885 times and 49%, and Mainz's Just don't at 729 times and 62%, so four channels in Europe have had more than half of their season delivered by one upload.

Brentford's 3-0 over Chelsea is the only match highlight in the ten, at 556 times the median and 37% of the club's season, and Sevilla has two entries, the Vamos equipo celebration at 8.7 million views and the rain clip at 6.1 million, which are the biggest absolute numbers in the list apart from the PSG France vs Morocco Short at 44.1 million in tenth. Brighton's 9 July 2026 Short sits seventh with 6.3 million views, 921 likes and 35 comments, the one entry whose audience I would want explained.

Eight of the ten are Shorts under 40 seconds and none of the eight contains match footage, and the lifts say what the smaller channels already know, that one clip of a player being himself can outweigh a season of highlights, and the chart above says how rarely it happens in Italy and Germany compared with Spain and England.

12Every channel in the five leagues, ranked by season views

Barcelona is the biggest football channel in Europe this season, with 326.4 million views from 515 videos, ahead of the Premier League channel at 292.4 million, the LaLiga channel at 228.8 million, Real Madrid at 209.2 million and Arsenal at 174.3 million, and the top ten, which continues with Manchester United, Liverpool, Bayern, PSG and Juventus, holds 67% of all the views in the dashboard. The top 20 holds 87%, and the five league channels together hold 25%, 714.5 million views, with the Premier League and LaLiga channels alone taking 521.2 million of that.

The ranking by league says where the money is. Ten of the top 25 channels are English, six are Spanish, four are Italian, three are German and two are French, and the Italian four are Juventus in tenth, the Serie A channel in thirteenth, Inter in fifteenth and Milan in seventeenth, so the biggest Italian club channel sits behind Bayern, PSG and four English channels, and Manchester City, in eleventh with 96.2 million, has published 210 videos, 390 fewer than Juventus.

Per video the table has two kinds of outlier. The Premier League channel averages 991.5 thousand views per Short, the best Shorts average of any channel near the top of the table, and Barcelona averages 886.8 thousand per live stream from 24 of them, while Manchester City's 76 long-form videos average 745.2 thousand and Bayern's 61 average 654.0 thousand, the two best long-form averages among the big channels. Chelsea gets 519.3 thousand per long video and 182.4 thousand per Short, nearly three to one in favour of long-form, and Sevilla gets 336.0 thousand per Short and 12.1 thousand per long video, nearly 28 to one the other way, so the same format decision gives opposite answers at two clubs in the top 20.

The bottom of the table is eight channels under 200 thousand views for the whole season, Auxerre at 189.3 thousand, Lecce at 146.5 thousand, Venezia at 145.2 thousand, Rayo Vallecano at 95.5 thousand, Frosinone at 76.8 thousand, Le Mans at 75.4 thousand, Troyes at 70.6 thousand and Lorient at 47.4 thousand, and between them they have published 267 videos in 106 days, fewer than Liverpool, and 846.7 thousand views, which is less than a single Premier League channel Short earns on average. Rayo and Lecce have not published a Short in the window, and neither has Le Havre just above them, and every one of the eight is on the zero-days chart above.

The useful rows are in the middle. Como, with 14 long-form videos averaging 171.6 thousand against 42.9 thousand for its 151 Shorts, Tottenham, with 73 long-form videos averaging 182.1 thousand against 64.2 thousand for its 238 Shorts, and Everton, with 57 long-form videos at 121.2 thousand against 33.9 thousand for its 92 Shorts, are all clubs that have found a format with an audience and feed it lightly, and that is the cheapest growth on the page, because the audience is already there and the club is choosing to publish something else.