Follow today’s live coverage of the Premier League season opener between Manchester United and Fulham

Gary Neville has joined NBC Sports as a special writer for the network’s Premier League coverage for the 2024–25 season.

The 49-year-old former Manchester United defender will contribute to the US broadcaster’s studio coverage every Sunday throughout the season, in addition to his work as a pundit for Sky Sports in the UK.

Neville will make his debut for NBC on Friday (August 16), covering the opening Premier League match between his former club United and Fulham at Old Trafford. He will also be part of the coverage on Sunday (August 18), when Brentford host Crystal Palace before Chelsea play Manchester City.

Earlier this month, Neville became the majority shareholder in League Two club Salford City by acquiring Peter Lim’s shares.

NBC has broadcast Premier League matches to fans in the US since the 2013-14 season. The current deal runs until 2027-28 and gives fans across the Atlantic access to all matches on the network’s sports channels. A selection of matches are also shown each week on Spanish-language channels Universo and Telemundo.

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All 380 Premier League matches will be shown live on NBCUniversal’s platforms, including NBC, Peacock (which will show at least 175 matches exclusively) and USA Network.

The NBC Sports studio team will be led by Rebecca Lowe, who will be supported by analysts Robbie Earle, Robbie Mustoe, Tim Howard and Danny Higginbotham. The commentary team will include Jon Champion and Peter Drury, as well as Lee Dixon and Graeme Le Saux.

As a player, Neville spent his entire club career at Manchester United. He made over 600 first-team appearances and won 21 trophies, including eight Premier League trophies. He captained the club for five seasons. The former right-back won 85 caps for England.

In the 2015–16 season, he briefly ventured into the coaching role of Valencia CF, winning 10 of his 28 games.

Neville has become one of England’s best-known football 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 fixture on British television screens for over a decade.

After nearly 20 years in Manchester United’s first team, Neville abruptly resigned at the start of the 2010–11 season after a disastrous performance against West Bromwich Albion convinced him it was time to go.

And he went almost straight into the television studio, where he became Sky Sports’ star analyst in 2011. He arrived at the perfect time for Sky, which had just sacked its long-serving chief analyst Andy Gray and was going through a period of transition: Neville brought fresh analysis and insight, usually in fairly blunt language, but usually with 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 part or not is unclear, but many of his on-air “discussions” with other pundits are edited out for Sky’s social media platforms. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still tell you things you might not have noticed, or that he doesn’t still provide interesting match analysis.

Expect plenty of passionate attention for United, often tinged with despair, given that his television career coincided with the last decade of sometimes tragicomic incompetence at Old Trafford. He will also make frequent self-deprecating references to his own brief but eventful managerial career, a four-month spell as Valencia manager that, he admits, was essentially a disaster from start to finish.

Neville is known for his good relationship with Carragher (Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)

On Sky, he has a seemingly friendly but sometimes rather bizarre relationship with Jamie Carragher, like two brothers from either side of the Manchester-Liverpool border who have never been able to bring themselves to say they really like each other but complement each other quite well. Carragher is part of CBS’s Champions League coverage in the US, so that relationship won’t continue here, but perhaps one of the other NBC pundits will take on that role. However, it’s hard to imagine him engaging in the same level of banter with Robbie Mustoe.

He also regularly works as a co-commentator for Sky, but his role at NBC doesn’t seem to include this and will be working exclusively in the studio. That’s a bit of a shame for American viewers, as they miss out on the wide range of strange noises he makes during games, from the ecstatic screech that greeted Fernando Torres’ goal for Chelsea in the 2012 Champions League semi-final against Barcelona, ​​to the quieter “oooooooooooohhhhhs” that ring out when he thinks someone has just missed a penalty.

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(Top photo: James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images)