The downfall of Arsenal Fan TV: How ‘corrupted’ kingmaker Robbie Lyle is combating to maintain management of his £6.8m empire run alongside a ‘Mad Dwarf’ amid poisonous fallouts, why viewing figures aren’t spiking anymore and the reality about star names’ exits

As Arsenal were reeling in the dying minutes of the Carabao Cup final, wondering how they had managed to let their Quadruple chances slip away after an unexpectedly toothless performance against title rivals Manchester City, Arsenal Fan TV were just getting started. In the next 24 hours, the infamous fan channel had posted 22 videos.

Ranging from the vox pops that made AFTV famous to podcasts and post-mortems, every possible aspect of Mikel Arteta and Co’s misstep at Wembley was dissected, before, without a beat, attention switched back to the main event, the Premier League title race.

For AFTV, winning the league will represent the high watermark of their 14 years of coverage. The channel have covered every season since their launch in 2012, but the production around their latest will bear little resemblance to their first.

From founder Robbie Lyle waiting by the statue of Tony Adams outside the Emirates Stadium with a microphone has sprung a YouTube behemoth, with 1.8million subscribers and an eye-popping back catalogue of 28,000 videos – that’s just under six per day. And that’s not to mention the never-ending service for their 1.3m Instagram followers and 1.1m more on TikTok.

The first videos back in 2012 picked up around 5,000 views each, but now the most popular figures – Lyle himself, Ty, Lee Judges and more – soar well past 100,000. But despite its status as one of the biggest fan channels in the world, AFTV’s history has been littered with setbacks, with Lyle fighting to keep control of his empire in the thick of messy talent exits and controversial decision-making. 

For Troopz (real name Aumar Hamilton), one of the more well-known former contributors whose star rose with the channel’s, success has warped Lyle’s creative and collaborative roots. Troopz left AFTV in 2020 for a lucrative deal with American platform Barstool Sports, but returned to creating independently in 2023. Since then, Lyle has left him out in the cold despite, Troopz alleges, his old friend knowing he has experienced hardships.

‘That man has been corrupted by, I don’t know what,’ he told occasional AFTV contributor Matisse Armani on his podcast Branching Out. ‘I don’t know if it’s brand deals. I don’t know if it’s bread (money).

‘I don’t know if it’s he sold AFTV… He don’t own (the full) shares how he used to. I don’t know if people are behind the scenes. He’s a puppet, and they’re just pulling his strings, because this ain’t Robbie, bro.’

If not, who is Robbie Lyle? In the late 1980s, he was attempting to build a career as a reggae DJ and performer under the name Crucial Robbie, releasing the anthem Proud To Be Black – although for more amusing reasons, AFTV fans are more likely to bring up his 1989 song Don’t Sniff Da Coke. Four decades on, he’s Don Robbie, a media mogul.

Not stopping at the management of one channel, Lyle has since created GFN (Global Fan Network), an umbrella media company creating YouTube content for a number of different Premier League clubs and football markets, which purports to have an inventory value of £8.6m per season. Although he heads up the conglomerate, Lyle is a director alongside Randhir Singh Heer and Brett Lotriet Best.

While the former appears content to keep a lower public profile, Best is a more outspoken media veteran, who previously ran a blog where he dubbed himself ‘the Mad Dwarf of immersive storytelling’ and shared his experiences from working in the industry. Best also enjoyed a dash of personal internet fame when he briefly went viral after using a message from Sir Ian McKellen to propose to his long-term partner.

But AFTV has remained the jewel in the crown of the platform, and 62-year-old Lyle is undoubtedly still its face, overseeing a raft of characters who pepper its fan reactions and podcasts and are almost as familiar as his own image. Keeping them out of hot water, however, might sometimes feel like an additional job.

Among them is Judges, a pundit whose most recent venting-of-his-spleen after Arsenal’s draw with Wolves went viral for calling upon Arteta to have ‘a little more f***ing b****cks’ about himself. No stranger to controversy, he found himself in hot water in December 2024 for saying that he wanted to ‘shoot’ Martin Odegaard after the club drew 0-0 with Everton.

AFTV later edited out the clip of Judges’ bad-taste outburst amid a fan backlash, but they were unable to control the narrative in a similar way in 2025, when it was another of their recurring personalities, Julian Bucker, who attracted fans’ ire for trying to direct Lyle out of an interview with fellow creator Saeed of Saeed TV.

In the viral clip, Becker was seen asking Lyle if he wanted to do the interview with Saeed wearing a badge featuring his support for Palestine. In the footage, Lyle attempted to dampen the potential for controversy, but it was too late, with Lyle forced to make a public statement as the furore grew louder.

‘I’ve spoken to Julian today, spoken to him about his actions,’ he said soberly to camera. ‘It’s been dealt with.’ Lyle also used the moment to underscore that the incident was why he attempted to keep his channels entirely free of politics. This issue is believed to have come to a head for AFTV before, with the departure of former pundit Moh Haider in 2021.

Haider had been a vocal supporter of Palestine and often wore his own pin. After his exit, he alleged on social media that the channel had shown ‘pure cowardice’ and a ‘lack of class’ in using his public support of Palestine as a reason to take him off the air.

AFTV said at the time that these claims were ‘baseless’ and ‘unsubstantiated’, but its then-head of business development Sartej Tucker did hint at the channel’s wish to stay staunchly apolitical with a post that reiterated: ‘We don’t engage in geopolitical conflicts.’ Daily Mail Sport has contacted Lyle for comment.

The most high-profile exit came in 2021. Liam Goodenough, self-styled as Mr DT, was a frequent contributor until he was sentenced to three years in prison, after previously being given 12 months and a 10-year restraining order for stalking and kidnapping an ex-partner.

Goodenough was one of AFTV’s most watched stars, appearing in by far the most watched video in the channel’s history – a typical ‘Arsene Wenger is finished’ rant after losing 4-0 at Anfield in 2017, which drew 4.6m views – and seven of the top 10. 

The channel issued a statement following his conviction saying it was ‘utterly appalled and disgusted’ by his actions, before confirming he would no longer appear on the outlet.

In an interview with The Athletic that year, Lyle admitted it had been a ‘learning moment’ for the channel but was keen to stress that it was ‘an issue for the individual, not for us. ‘That was a very rough moment,’ he said. ‘I knew he was in some problems, but I didn’t know the full extent. I found out at the same time as everyone else. And it was shocking.’ This account was later disputed by Goodenough.

While that case was cut-and-dried for AFTV, more thorny was the departure of a contributor known as Turkish, the online persona of Bilal Aydin. Turkish left the channel last autumn, as did another regular, James Bayliss, but while the latter remains involved in GFN, the former has appeared to suggest that internal conflicts forced him out, offering a similar view of his former employer to ex-colleague Troopz.

‘I don’t mean nothing by it, but I just didn’t care by the end of it,’ Turkish said when asked on the Branching Out podcast if he felt his fans deserved ‘closure’ following his abrupt departure from the channel. ‘I don’t mean (that towards) the community, but I just look back and it ended the way it ended.’

He added: ‘I don’t hate anyone, I don’t hold on to grudges or anything. In terms of Robbie, we just haven’t spoken, and that’s not since it’s happened, that’s before it happened. There’s nothing there that I see will turn around. He’s stubborn, I’m stubborn, that’s it.

‘In terms of generally, there’s a lot of people at that organisation that I’ve got love for. It didn’t end well, but two, three, four weeks, whatever it is, I’ve moved on. There are still open ends, but maybe it’s never going to close.’

Not for nothing is Robbie known as ‘the Don’. With his own appearance on the same podcast, he was quick to snuff out any suggestion of bad blood, while demanding focus be shifted.

‘In businesses, people move on, naturally,’ he said on the same podcast at the end of last year. ‘In football, you’ll have a player, (they’ll say) you’ve been great at a club. Look at Mo Salah at the moment. He’s great at Liverpool. He’s moving on at the end of the season, that happens all the time in business, in football, in sport. But for some reason, it happens with me – it’s a problem.

‘I understand why a lot of people will be like, “Oh, what happened there?” Man, whatever. It’s not as deep as what they’re thinking. Unfortunately, nothing’s forever. And people do move on. I might move on one day.

‘You don’t see a football club or even a lot of businesses, come out and give you the whole ins and outs of the (decision). People need to understand that you got to remain professional in these things. And just move on. Everybody gets on and moves on. You don’t really see me out there talking. I’ll just keep it to myself.’

Casting himself as a social media kingmaker, he added: ‘I want to focus on what I’m doing. I will never stop helping people. I’ll never stop helping people. And you know, if people feel that they were hard done by, that’s their opinion. I’m not this guy that’s out there, back and forth, back and forth. I haven’t got time for that. I really don’t. I’m trying to grow things. I’m trying to build things.’

If Lyle is losing his grip on his empire, it might have less to do with creative infighting and more with what is happening on the pitch. AFTV – which was forced by the club to rename itself from its original Arsenal Fan TV moniker in 2018 – came of age during the Gunners’ years in the wilderness, the WengerOut era. Their videos were divisive, with many Arsenal fans believing they had a negative impact on the club and even chanting for their contributers’ removal from the stands at the Emirates.

But the crash-outs and criticisms made for compelling, cross-supporter viewing. It’s no coincidence that their most-viewed video in recent weeks was Judges’ expletive-ladened dissection of Arsenal’s 2-2 draw with bottom club Wolves, with a staggering 645,000. The figures for the more mundane victories that see Arteta’s side marching towards a potential first league title in 20 years? Fewer than 10,000.

Of the channel’s 28,000 posts, 51 of them have more than a million views – and none of those 51 were posted in the last five seasons, as Arteta turns the club’s fortunes around. 

Arsenal have been keen to keep their distance from the channel of late, but may not go as far as wanting one of their biggest social media offshoots to become a victim of their success on the pitch. But if Arsenal are shocked by Championship side Southampton in Saturday’s FA Cup quarter-final, there could be at least a couple of Arsenal fans secretly happy.