Trump TV and the Lesson from Football's In-House Channels

19:00 Eastern Time, United States, September 21, 2026. A stream of images left the White House and went straight online, bypassing every newsroom and every editor. It called itself "TRUMP TV: The Essentials Station", broadcasting around the clock, 24 hours a day, gathering speeches, announcements, videos and the moments that the broadcaster itself judged to be the most important of Donald Trump and his administration. Among the opening items was the speech at Mount Rushmore on July 3 and a set of recent videos on the administration's activities. The White House said the content would be updated in real time, carried on its live streaming page and on its digital platforms, including YouTube.

I sat in front of the screen and recognised the shape of it. I had seen that shape a long time ago, with one difference: the first time I saw it was in a football stadium, not in a government building.

A few days before September 21, the White House restricted access for CNN, MS NOW and Politico, citing what it called false reporting. The three outlets filed a federal lawsuit seeking the restoration of their credentials. On the same day, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News decided to suspend joint coverage of presidential events, after CNN was excluded from the shared video pool.

What was excluded here is a mechanism, not a single outlet. In event broadcasting, the "pool" is a small group responsible for producing the images and then distributing them to the other outlets. No newsroom has enough money or enough space to place its own camera in every corner. Football calls the same mechanism by another name: the host broadcaster. FIFA handed World Cup production to Host Broadcast Services from 2026 onward; the International Olympic Committee did the same with Olympic Broadcasting Services. One source of images, many broadcasters.

When a member is pushed out of that group, the damage does not stop with them. The other four networks suspended cooperation, and viewers lost footage that no single outlet has the resources to produce alone. I have seen this in football, in seasons when the production rights holder changed: the audience does not lose the match, it loses the camera angle. It loses the moment when the coach's seat stands empty in the 90th minute, loses the sight of a substitute lowering his head before the referee's whistle.

Football was twenty years ahead of the White House on this.

MUTV went on air in 2026, starting as a joint venture between Manchester United, BSkyB and Granada, and became wholly owned by the club in 2026. Real Madrid TV launched in 2026. Barcelona had its own channel from the late 1990s under the name Barça TV. Chelsea TV opened in 2026. Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester City each followed with channels of their own. That wave is no different from the White House opening a 24-hour stream today: an institution decides that its own message deserves its own pipeline, and does not want to wait for someone to call back and ask questions.

But a club channel operates differently from a newsroom. It does not go looking for news. It archives. Its three functions, put simply: replay what already worked, broadcast what needs to be said without being questioned, and accumulate an archive that will still be usable thirty years from now.

The third function is the most debatable and the least discussed. A Cristiano Ronaldo goal on MUTV gets replayed three times in a week. A Park Ji-sung training session is cut into a short feature for the Asian market. A young player scores for the under-21s, and fifteen years later, when he wears the national shirt, that clip is the only footage left. A club channel does not persuade the sceptic. It only guarantees one thing: in the official memory, the club's version is the only version kept.

Real Madrid TV is the clearest example of how that pipeline can become a weapon. The channel has repeatedly aired compilations about refereeing decisions, and Spanish referees themselves have publicly reacted. Barcelona went the opposite way: Barça TV closed to cut costs. Two clubs, two choices, one question: is an in-house channel a tool of pressure, or a cost that never pays back?

In Asia, I noticed a difference. Big clubs in China and Japan mostly use in-house channels to teach and to bind: behind the scenes, nutrition, Son Heung-min's training sessions, the daily life of the national team. In Vietnam, that gap is usually filled by third parties. VPF sells the V.League broadcast rights, and those rights have passed through outlets such as VTVcab, Next Media and FPT Play across many seasons. Most Vietnamese clubs have no pipeline of their own. They live on other people telling their story, and the footage of Nguyễn Quang Hải sits with a television station, not with a club.

Based on my experience watching matches on both sides, the difference is not money. It is about who is accountable for memory. A club without its own channel still has a memory, but that memory sits with reporters, with camera operators hired by the day, and with the stands.

Inside the business logic of the in-house channel there is one troubling point, and it is exactly what I keep saying about the transfer market. When a large institution buys up the whole production chain — images, broadcast, archive — the value left for the smaller side grows thinner. Small broadcasters lose the right to produce, and with it the right to tell. The player, the central figure of the story, becomes raw material on a conveyor belt he does not control. I hold the same principle when writing about loans with an obligation to buy: a system that lets the small side develop players and then hand the finished product to the big side will, sooner or later, take away the small side's right to decide. Broadcasting works the same way.

The newest wave does not take the shape of a television channel. It takes the shape of documentary. Amazon made "All or Nothing" with Manchester City and Tottenham. Netflix made "Sunderland 'Til I Die". ESPN made "The Last Dance". Clubs open their dressing rooms, sign with outside producers, and call it special access. I work as a documentary screenwriter, so I know the price of that arrangement: when people open a door for you, they also choose which door to open. The best film about a team is usually the film that team did not want anyone to make.

In 2026 I wrote an analysis of the Shanghai derby and was attacked by a group of male supporters for reasons that had nothing to do with the content. I did not argue. I opened a small viewing session in a café and sat listening to my critics explain how they read a match. That evening turned out to be a conversation about feeling. Since then I dropped the chart-driven style and began every script with a collective emotion. The memory of a match belongs to the people watching, not to the person holding the camera.

During the period when stadiums were closed because of the pandemic, I asked to be let into an empty ground just to record the sound of a stand with nobody in it. No singing, no shouting, only wind running across the plastic seats. That is something I have never found on any official channel.

The easiest thing to believe, and the easiest thing to get wrong, is that whoever owns the pipeline owns the story.

Football has answered that with its own history. Barça TV closed in 2026. Chelsea TV closed in 2026. MUTV shrank until it was little more than a service inside the club's product bundle. Those channels did not lose for lack of money, and not for lack of footage. They lost because fans do not watch self-praise. They watch in order to argue, to doubt, to see their team lose and to look for reasons. A channel that lacks the courage to replay its own heaviest defeat cannot become a place people return to.

On the night of the 2026 World Cup final in Qatar, I did not go into Lusail Stadium but sat in the media centre. The image of Lionel Messi lifting the trophy that the whole world remembers was produced by a shared crew and distributed onward. No club and no federation shot that moment on its own. Had that sharing mechanism broken that night, the whole world would have been left with a single angle.

Also at a stadium in Russia, at Kazan Arena in 2026, after South Korea beat Germany 2-0, I stood in the mixed zone and asked a German supporter named Klaus about the first match he remembered. He talked about the 2026 final and a scarf he had kept since he was ten. I did not write down the score. I wrote down how a match reaches into a childhood. People remember the shaky lens of a camera operator who had to climb into the stand because he was refused a technical-area pass. They remember the roar of the crowd breaking out when nobody managed to cut a highlight in time.

At the events of September 21, the same thing is repeating itself in a less visible way. The 24-hour stream is the loud part, the part photographed and reported. The part that damages the public sits elsewhere: four major networks suspending shared production. When the image-sharing mechanism breaks, viewers do not lose one point of view. They lose every remaining angle. The outlet pushed out of the briefing room becomes a symbol. The public loses footage that none of them realised they had lost.

In football, as in film, people remember the silent scene most. Nobody remembers the intro package cut by the club. I record the atmosphere before I record the match, because the loudest noise always comes last. It is the thing that is banned that gives birth to memory.

When the lights go out, the match truly begins. And when those lights are switched on by one side alone, people see only the part of the pitch that side wants lit.

The dispute between the White House and the American press will run for a while, but for me the most telling trace is not the new stream. It is whether those four networks return to the shared image mechanism. In football, every time one party is left with a monopoly on the lens, the memory of a whole season becomes the memory of one person. And the memory of one person cannot be verified by anyone.