Why Ruckstar Lizzie, Squidge and Rugby Nause are the future of ITV highlights

The future of rugby highlights shows has been placed in the hands of social media influencers as the sport attempts to reach out to a new generation of supporters to save the genre from extinction.

The radical departure brings to an end the traditional format fronted by two pundits – last season’s show starred former players David Flatman and Topsy Ojo – in favour of a group of YouTubers known by the social-media monikers “Ruckstar Lizzie”, “Squidge” and “Rugby Nause”.

Whether this represents a brave new world or a desperate last roll of the dice remains to be seen. Flatman and Ojo were popular and well-known figures, as was Ojo’s predecessor Mark Durden-Smith. Many traditionalists are likely to baulk at the prospect of it being left to YouTube personalities to distil and dissect the weekend’s rugby action.

Yet what is certain is that something had to change. When Craig Doyle first presented the Premiership highlights show on ITV with former England and Lions lock Martin Bayfield 15-plus years ago, it regularly attracted audiences of more than one million viewers on a Sunday night.

Since then, an alarming collapse in viewing figures in recent years has put the entire concept of a rugby highlights show in jeopardy. It is understood that ITV stopped paying for the broadcasting rights several years ago, with Premiership Rugby having to cover the costs to ensure continued exposure for the sport.

Rugby is not alone in the challenges it faces. Outside of football, where BBC’s Match of the Day still commands a vast audience (33 million viewers total last season), highlights packages for other sports have been in freefall. Even the NFL has decided not to continue with its highlights show this season on ITV.

‘I know people will begrudge a new show like this’

Doyle, whose company 3 Rock Productions produces the new rugby highlights show, which goes to air for the first time on Wednesday on ITV1 and ITV4, says the decline in popularity is the result of a seismic shift in the way sport is consumed. Not only has demand soared for live sport, but that also coincided with the growth of almost instant clipped highlights on social media.

“These shows don’t rate so well anymore because people have often consumed most of the highlights before they hit the television,” Doyle told Telegraph Sport. “Clips of tries being scored are being posted on social media as they are scored. It is the same with football, but Match of the Day just has this loyal audience.

“We have definitely noticed that the numbers watching rugby highlights has dropped, and I know this show very well because I used to present it with Bayfs [Bayfield]. But when we hosted it, people weren’t reliant on their phones to watch highlights. It has changed utterly and completely, and we have to stop pretending it hasn’t changed, and we have to resign ourselves to the fact that it has and react to it.

“I know people will begrudge a new show like this and I realise people loved Flats and Topsy, as do I, that’s why I got them to do the show in the first place. But that stuff, it just doesn’t work as well anymore, we have to react. The audience for those shows is largely over 50 and that is not a growing number. The 30- and 40-year-olds are not going to become those 50-year-olds, they are trained completely differently. It is not an audience that will replace itself.

“We do a lot of research into this, audience research, data, numbers research. The younger age group is going to rugby matches but the TV audience of that age group is dropping. So it is there, but they just don’t want to watch that old-style talking heads show.”

‘You need a constant presence’

It is hoped that tapping into the followers of the influencers will penetrate this younger audience. Lizzie Musa (Ruckstar Lizzie) has more than 107,000 followers on Tiktok, and her YouTube channel has attracted almost 650,000 views since its launch in 2020. Andrew Nolan, who runs the Rugby Nause account, has more than 62,000 followers on TikTok, while the Squidge rugby channel on YouTube, which is run by Robbie Owen, has almost 250,000 subscribers.

The new show, called Gallagher Premiership Unleashed, will have a 30-minute slot on ITV 1 at 11.45pm on Wednesdays, with a one-hour version broadcast on ITV 4 at 7pm (the opening show is at 11.45am because of a clash with live sport).

Doyle says it is hoped it will also drive synergy between the terrestrial channels and social media to grow the audience for the highlights show.

“It is not a good economy to make a highlights show that exists just on television that goes out once and then disappears for a week,” Doyle added. “What we have realised, and what all the research shows is that you need a constant presence, not just on television but it has to be on social media, it has to be on YouTube. You need to be constantly feeding rugby into people and the best people at doing it are the people who are doing it all the time, like Ruckstar Lizzie, like Squidge and Rugby Nause.

“So we have got them involved while keeping elements of the traditional highlights show while getting their take on it. Because their take is getting hundreds of thousands of viewers on their platforms in the age group that we can’t get to. We have tried and tried and tried. But these people are getting to the core audience that will help the sport grow. We are helping them by giving them a platform and they are helping us reach an audience we are not currently reaching.

“The expectation now from the sports audience is to be drip-fed their sport all throughout the week. So you can’t just go and cook a roast chicken on a Sunday now and go right, you’re all fed, see you next Sunday.

“We need to get that roast chicken of rugby and we need to make sure we go chicken soup on a Monday and a risotto on a Tuesday and chicken sandwiches on a Wednesday, and stretch it out as long as we possibly can.

“Live sport is the chicken, but we need to be decent chefs and make sure that we’re using it to keep feeding rugby to people over the course of the week. You want to get them to the point where they’re just over the last week for the next week starts.”

‘Let’s see what social media has to say’

A new highlights programme, Gallagher Premiership Unleashed, made its debut in the prized slot of 11.45am on ITV4 on Wednesday morning, immediately following an episode of Mr Bean in which he is being harassed by a bumblebee.

If you are looking for cutting insight and blistering analysis then I am sure you can catch a repeat of that iconic Mr Bean episode another time. As for Gallagher Premiership Unleashed (GPU), well at least it has not set itself a high bar for the rest of its run.

Gone is the expertise and convivial warmth of David Flatman and Topsy Ojo, in come the “influencers” Ruckstar Lizzie and Rugby Nause. As Craig Doyle, who owns the production company behind GPU, explained to my colleague Gavin Mairs, this was a deliberate pivot away from a traditional highlights programme in an attempt to use the influencers to reach a younger demographic.

But it feels that GPU, at least in its first episode, is falling between two stools. Approximately 90 per cent of the programme was highlights, using TNT Sports’ match commentary, some of which was now five days old. There was no discussion of any of the main talking points, or even an attempt at analysing each result beyond the single most horrifying sentence in the English language: “Let’s see what social media has to say.”

The remaining 10 per cent was given over to the influencers to do their thing. This consisted of RuckStar Lizzie asking Bath supporters: “What does rugby mean to you?” and Rugby Nause reviewing the new kits. Groundbreaking it was not.

As Doyle says, the viewership for highlights programmes across the board has fallen off a cliff, particularly since nearly every try is posted to social media within minutes of it being scored. So they needed to try to do something different. The disappointment was that they did not try to be bolder.

If the very concept of highlights on terrestrial television is redundant and catering to the over-50 demographic is effectively a waste of resources then why not give the influencers free rein to tell the story of a game through their eyes? Ruckstar Lizzie has a definite charisma, but is conducting a vox-pop around the back of the stands of the Rec really going to engage the next generation of fans?

Or make it a magazine show where you are unashamedly appealing to Gen Z, no matter how horrifying the traditional rugby audience may find that. The “Grassrootsbeauts” feature, showcasing fun tries scored in the community game, may have legs if they can extend it. There are also any number of excellent analysts on social media who can dissect patterns over a whole round of games or pull threads from individual performances. Hopefully the addition of Squidge, a popular YouTuber, to the influencer ranks next week will improve the standard of analysis and everyone involved will grow in confidence.

In its present form, GPU is still very much a highlights show but in a midweek graveyard slot with no analysis. That will satisfy no one.