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Gary Neville has joined NBC Sports as a special contributor for the network’s Premier League coverage for the 2024-25 season.
The 49-year-old former Manchester United defender will contribute to the U.S. network’s studio coverage on a weekly basis each Sunday throughout the season, in addition to his punditry work for Sky Sports in the UK.
Neville will make his NBC debut on Friday (August 16) to cover the Premier League’s opening match of the campaign between his former club United and Fulham at Old Trafford, and will also feature during Sunday’s (August 18) coverage, when Brentford host Crystal Palace before Chelsea play Manchester City.
Earlier this month, Neville became the majority shareholder at League Two club Salford City after acquiring Peter Lim’s shares.
NBC has been showing Premier League games to fans in the U.S. since the 2013-14 season. Its current deal runs until 2027-28 and will give fans across the Atlantic access to all games across the network’s sports channels. A selection of matches are also shown on Spanish-speaking channels Universo and Telemundo each week.
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All 380 Premier League matches are shown live across NBCUniversal platforms, including NBC, Peacock (which shows at least 175 games exclusively), and USA Network.
NBC Sports’ studio team is led by Rebecca Lowe, who will be joined by analysts Robbie Earle, Robbie Mustoe, Tim Howard and Danny Higginbotham. The commentary team is made up of Jon Champion and Peter Drury as well as Lee Dixon and Graeme Le Saux.
As a player, Neville spent the entirety of his club career at Manchester United — making over 600 first-team appearances and winning 21 trophies including eight Premier League trophies, while captaining the club for five seasons. The former right-back was capped 85 times by England.
He briefly ventured into management in the 2015-16 season at Valencia, where he won 10 of his 28 matches in charge.
Neville has become one of English football’s most prominent pundits since his retirement, having joined Sky Sports at the start of the 2011-12 season.
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What can NBC viewers expect from Neville?
Neville has been a consistent presence on UK TV screens for over a decade.
After nearly 20 years in the Manchester United first-team, Neville retired abruptly at the start of the 2010/11 season after a calamitous performance against West Bromwich Albion convinced him that it was time to go.
And he went virtually straight into the TV studio, becoming Sky Sports’ star analyst in 2011. He arrived at the perfect time for Sky, who had just dismissed their long-time lead pundit Andy Gray and were in a state of flux: Neville brought fresh analysis and insight, usually in pretty forthright terms, but as a rule taking a more intelligent approach than many were used to at the time.
Since then his style has become more polished, but perhaps more confrontational: whether this is a conscious decision on his behalf or not is unclear, but plenty of his on-air ‘discussions’ with other pundits end up being clipped for Sky’s social media platforms. Which is not to say he doesn’t still tell you things you might not already have spotted, or that he doesn’t still provide interesting analysis of games.
You can expect plenty of passionate focus on United, which will often be tinged with despair given that his TV career has coincided with the last decade of occasionally tragicomic incompetence at Old Trafford. He will also frequently make self-deprecating reference to his own, brief but eventful managerial career, a four-month spell in charge of Valencia that he admits was essentially a disaster from beginning to end.
Neville is renowned for his rapport with Carragher (Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)
On Sky, he has an ostensibly friendly but occasionally quite spiky relationship with Jamie Carragher, like two brothers from either side of the Manchester-Liverpool divide who could never bring themselves to say they actually liked each other, but complement each other quite nicely. Carragher is part of CBS’s Champions League coverage in the U.S., so that relationship won’t continue here, but perhaps one of the other NBC pundits will fill that role. That said, you can’t necessarily see him engaging in the same level of badinage with Robbie Mustoe.
For Sky he is also regularly a co-commentator, but his role at NBC appears not to include that and will strictly be studio-based. Which is something of a shame for American viewers, because you will miss out on the wide range of curious noises he makes during games, ranging from the ecstatic screech that greeted Fernando Torres’s goal for Chelsea in the 2012 Champions League semi-final against Barcelona, to the more low key “oooooooooooohhhhhs” that appear when he thinks someone has just given away a penalty.
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(Top photo: James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images)
