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Gary Neville has joined NBC Sports as a special contributor to their Premier League coverage in the 2024-25 season.
The 49-year-old former Manchester United defender will work as a pundit for Britain’s Sky Sports as well as contributing to the US network’s studio coverage every Sunday during the season.
Neville will make his NBC debut on Friday (August 16) when he will cover the Premier League season opener at Old Trafford between his former club United and Fulham, before also covering Brentford vs Crystal Palace and Chelsea vs Manchester City on Sunday (August 18).
Earlier this month, Neville became the largest shareholder in League Two club Salford City after acquiring Peter Lim’s shares.
NBC has been broadcasting Premier League games to fans in the United States since the 2013-14 season. The current agreement runs until 2027-28, and fans across the Atlantic can watch every game on the network’s sports channels. Spanish-speaking channels Universo and Telemundo also broadcast select games each week.
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All 380 Premier League matches will be broadcast live on NBCUniversal platforms, including NBC, Peacock (which will broadcast at least 175 matches exclusively) and USA Network.
NBC Sports’ studio team will be led by Rebecca Rowe, with analysts Robbie Earl, Robbie Mustoe, Tim Howard and Danny Higginbotham, while the commentary team consists of John Champion, Peter Drury, Lee Dixon and Graham Le Saux.
Neville spent his entire club career at Manchester United, making more than 600 appearances for the first team, winning 21 titles, including eight Premier League titles, and captaining the club for five seasons. The former right-back also made 85 appearances for England.
He had a brief stint as manager at Valencia in 2015-16, winning 10 of his 28 games.
After retiring, Neville joined Sky Sports at the start of the 2011-12 season and has become one of the most prominent commentators in English football.
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What can NBC viewers expect from Neville?
Neville has been a constant presence on British TV screens for over a decade.
After nearly two decades with Manchester United’s first team, Neville suddenly retired at the start of the 2010/11 season, after a dismal performance against West Bromwich Albion convinced him it was time to leave.
He then moved virtually immediately into a television studio, becoming Sky Sports’ star analyst in 2011. Sky were in a state of turmoil, having just sacked their long-time chief commentator Andy Gray, so Neville arrived at the perfect time: Neville brought fresh analysis and insight, usually in a fairly straightforward manner but generally taking a more intelligent approach than many were used to at the time.
Since then, his style has become more refined and perhaps more confrontational. It’s unclear whether this is a conscious decision on his part, but many of the “debates” he has had on-air with other pundits have been cut out for Sky’s social media platforms. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t still say things you might not be aware of, or provide some interesting analysis of the matches.
Expect glowing coverage of United, but it will likely be tinged with despair as his television history overlaps with a decade of tragicomic ineptitude at Old Trafford, and he will often self-deprecatingly refer to his own short but tumultuous managerial career, including four months in charge of Valencia which he admits was essentially a disaster from start to finish.
Neville is known for his close relationship with Carragher (Katherine Eville/Getty Images)
At Sky, he has a superficially friendly but sometimes rather acrimonious relationship with Jamie Carragher. Like brothers from either side of the Manchester-Liverpool divide, they can never really say they like each other, but they complement each other well. With Carragher working on CBS’s Champions League coverage in the US, this relationship won’t continue here, but perhaps one of the other NBC commentators will fill that role. That said, I don’t necessarily think he’ll share the same level of banter as Robbie Musto.
While he’s also a regular co-commentator for Sky, his role at NBC will apparently not include that and will be entirely studio-based, which is a bit of a shame for American viewers, as they’ll miss out on the variety of strange noises he makes during games, from the screams of delight following Chelsea’s Fernando Torres’ goal against Barcelona in the 2012 Champions League semi-final, to the subdued “oooooohhhhh” he lets out when he thinks someone has awarded a penalty.
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(Top photo: James Gill – Dane House/Getty Images)
