Yasmin Bhan - Prompt 4

 “The Champions”: A Bleacher Report “Reality TV” Cartoon Show 

Bleacher Report, a website that provides information about sports culture, is known for keeping the public informed on all things football (soccer), basketball, wrestling, and American football. They post information on player injuries, league controversy, and live updates on games and matches. Their YouTube channel has almost 2.5 million subscribers, with their most popular video, “The Champions: Season 1 in Full”, reaching 13 million views. “The Champions” consists of a series of episodes where fans can watch cartoon versions of their favorite Champions League players and managers living in a villa. The UEFA Champions League (UCL) is an annual football tournament where 32 of the best teams in the world play each other for the championship title. According to Statista, UCL has had at most 105 million viewers in 2017, and 48.7 million more recently in 2021. This means that the Bleacher Report YouTube channel has a huge audience, as each dedicated fan can enjoy comedic videos based on their favorite players. The theme of “The Champions” YouTube videos is to make fun of the loved and respectable football players of the UCL. The format is similar to that of a popular reality TV show, like “Love Island”, where they create scenarios of the cartoon players interacting based on the drama of the real world Champions League. 

In the first YouTube video of season 6 in the series, Bleacher Report jokes about two famous players, Messi and Ronaldo. It discusses their struggle with becoming older players in the league and having to watch younger players get more attention than them. In one scene of the cartoon, Messi and Ronaldo are getting their anger out by kicking soccer balls at the faces of the younger players, when they accidentally kick their balls at each other and get transported into a different universe of the “Super League”. The “Super League” was an extremely controversial occurrence in the football world where 12 of the top European football teams agreed to join a league. While this seems like just another football competition, the public was angry when they found out that the teams were selected based on their revenue, leading to the eventual abandonment of the “Super League”. Bleacher Report turns this controversy into a comedic YouTube video where Messi and Ronaldo are transported into an alternate universe where the Super League succeeded. In this alternate universe, football as a sport ultimately fails and all of the players and managers are now “randos”. Messi becomes a “goatherd”, a play on the fact that he is often considered the “GOAT” (Greatest Of All Time). Pep Guardiola, manager for Manchester City, becomes a chef. Christian Pulisic, a player for Chelsea and star of the USA Men’s National Soccer Team, works at Hershey Park as a Hershey’s Kiss mascot. My personal favorite, Neymar, discusses his life updates, saying “Thanks for checking out my dating profile! I’m into Batman cosplay and I work at a dive bar”. 

In Shifman’s “Memes in Digital Culture”, she describes the “Web 2.0”, consisting of apps like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, which represent “express paths for meme diffusion” (Shiman 2014). Shifman’s discussion of sharing applies to Bleacher Report’s YouTube videos because they create a “sharing economy” on many platforms. Bleacher Report has 20 million followers on Instagram, where they post short clips of their YouTube videos. This makes it easy for their audience to share their videos to friends on social media. Although YouTube videos and memes belong to different genres of social media content, Shifman’s attributes of propagation, reproduction, and diffusion apply to the comedic videos created by Bleacher Report. The YouTube videos create memes out of the players and situations of the Champions League by picking specific aspects of each scenario and creating a popular joke. For example, Christian Ronaldo’s large ego is often mocked by Bleacher Report, as his cartoon character always talks about all of his trophies, awards, and how amazing he looks. 

The format of the BR YouTube videos is intriguing because it mimics a reality TV show format, with none of the issues of one. In shows like “Love Island” or “The Real Housewives'', producers actually manipulate real people into creating the drama and content that they want. However, in the BR videos, producers are able to create entertaining scenarios in reality TV format without affecting people’s real lives. In Ouellette & Murray’s “Remaking Television Culture”, they discuss reality TV through the years, and how “what ties together all of the formats of the reality TV genre is their professed abilities to more fully provide viewers an unmediated, voyeuristic, and playful look into the ‘entertaining real’” (Ouellette & Murray 2009). This is interesting to observe in “The Champions” because the inclusion of interviews, voice overs, cuts, drama, and cheesy music, create the perfect combination of entertainment, or the “entertaining real” for viewers. They even have a reunion episode where the players and managers answer questions about the season, and what they like or disliked about the show. Additionally, “The Champions” has a factor that many reality TV shows don’t have, which is that the audience already knows and loves the cast. Many Champions League fans have football their whole lives and are hardcore fans of the players they watched grow up. Oulette and Murray also discuss “The Commercialization of the Real”, another idea that can be applied to the BR YouTube videos. Although the show isn’t real reality TV, the jokes are based on real life occurrences in the Champions League. Bleacher Report grew from simply reporting sports news on their website, to taking advantage of the rise of reality TV and commercializing an extremely popular sport in a niche way. Oulette and Murray even mention the role YouTube plays in distribution of reality TV clips, explaining that subscribers can “share memorable clips from the most recent episode of their favorite reality TV show or even produce reality shorts based on their own lives” (Ouellette & Murray 2009). It’s compelling to look at the Bleacher Report YouTube videos through the lens of a reality TV show and see how BR was able to create a show with all the aspects and success of reality TV without exploiting real people. 

The first episode of season six is a great example of the ways BR uses reality TV tactics to engage their audience. By creating a storyline around Messi and Ronaldo, the famously loved players reaching the ends of their careers, they appeal to their audience and leave their fans with a sense of familiarity. Bleacher Report combines important aspects of reality TV and memes to create popular, entertaining YouTube videos for a niche, yet huge audience of die hard UCL fans. 

Ouellette, L., & Murray, S. (2009). Reality Tv: Remaking television culture. New York University Press. 

Shifman, L. (2015). Memes in digital culture. CRC Press