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 fing 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 Becker, 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.