Former England and Leicester City forward Jamie Vardy has become a Bundesliga rights holder.Vardy’s YouTube channel, “Jamie Vardy’s Having a Party”, which was launched in June, will broadcast seven Bundesliga games live this season, all on Friday nights, beginning with this week’s season-opening match between champions Bayern Munich and Stuttgart.Vardy’s channel is owned and produced by Banijay Entertainment, who have agreed a one-year deal with the Bundesliga which will see the former Premier League winner added to the league’s roster of broadcasters.The Bundesliga broke new ground in 2025, when it became the first major league in Europe to award live rights in the UK to content creators. That deal saw The Overlap and That’s Football, the YouTube show hosted by Mark Goldbridge, share the league’s Friday night games. Those matches were also broadcast live on the BBC’s red button service, as the league pursued more discoverability and targeted different demographics with contrasting viewing habits.For the 2026-27 season, The Overlap, which was founded and remains co-owned by Gary Neville, the former Manchester United and England defender, will no longer show live games.In April 2026, the media group completed the acquisition of Mark Goldbridge’s YouTube channels, including That’s Football. As a result, while Goldbridge’s agreement with the Bundesliga has been extended, The Overlap’s partnership has been reformatted, with the channel showing supplementary programming and interviews this season, rather than the games themselves.Vardy will now take The Overlap’s place as the second content creator. The rest of the UK and Ireland rights package remains unaffected, with Sky Sports continuing to show Saturday night’s matches, Prime Sport retaining Sunday’s games on a pay-per-view basis and Samsung TV also showing games on a free-to-air basis.Vardy, 39, is currently a free agent after leaving Cremonese this summer. He scored seven goals in 29 appearances for the Italian side, whom he joined from Leicester a year ago, but was unable to prevent their relegation from Serie A.The striker left Leicester City at the end of the 2024-25 season following the club’s relegation from the Premier League.That brought an end to the striker’s 13-year stay at the Midlands clubs, where he scored 200 goals in 500 appearances, memorably winning the Premier League title in 2015-16 and the FA Cup five years later.Vardy, who made 26 appearances for England before retiring from international duty in August 2018, made Premier League history by scoring in 11 consecutive matches in 2015-16 — scoring 24 goals that season, and then being the highest scorer in the division with 23 goals in 2019-20.Prior to joining Leicester as a 25-year-old in 2012, Vardy has spent the first six seasons of his career in non-league football.Another bold stride for the BundesligaWith The Overlap’s acquisition of Mark Goldbridge’s various channels, the Bundesliga will continue to work with both entities, whilst also opening up another opportunities for a new content creator to join their stable.Enter Vardy. What his presentation looks like remains to be seen. His channel is in its infancy, but Banijay Entertainment are a vast, veteran organisation with experience of creating different types of content across many different territories. They are the production company behind The Traitors, Survivor and Big Brother and so, most likely, this new show will have a level of polish.Alongside Vardy, the live match coverage will also involve former footballers and other content creators.From the Bundesliga’s perspective, it’s another bold stride. This is a paid agreement, so it’s of financial benefit, but the appeal mainly lies in the chance to capture new audiences. Last season, Goldbridge’s broadcast of Bayern Munich against RB Leipzig, the first game of the season and the first of his agreement, attracted an audience of 236,000 viewers. Like Vardy, he had no natural connection to the Bundesliga or to German football more broadly, but that did not prevent the coverage across the season being seen by large audiences and by younger demographics.The equation is not quite the same with Vardy. His channel currently has 11,000 subscribers, making it much smaller than either The Overlap or That’s Football, but the thinking will be similar. The Bundesliga wants to be discoverable. It does not want to sit behind a paywall or be buried within a subscription service. It also wants to show itself in unexpected places, where it would not typically be found, giving it the opportunity to build new fans.Increasingly, based on success last season, it believes that content creators are a reliable way of pursuing those aims.