Ronaldo, Messi, Salah: The worst football thumbnails on YouTube

Videos on YouTube can be a great way to get your daily fix of football content.

There are plenty of brilliant channels that provide highlights, training videos and sometimes just a bit of fun. From football fails to football funnies, there’s usually something for every kind of fan.

But not every YouTube channel holds itself to a particularly high standard, resulting in some awful content, and more specifically, awful thumbnails.

While you may not know the name Adam Boultwood, chances are, if you’ve watched football content on YouTube, you’ve probably seen a video he was in some way involved in making.

Boultwood has previously worked on True Geordie’s The Kick Off, Football Daily and with Hashtag United. His latest job is working with content creators UMM, who recently collaborated with Ian Wright for the Movember charity campaign.

But his latest and greatest piece of content was a Twitter thread where he ‘studied the greatest YouTube football thumbnails ever.’

Boultwood created a ‘very serious and important thread’ looking at some of the most ridiculous thumbnails the site had to offer, and it is an absolute masterpiece.

The thread begins with an introduction from Adam and a thumbnail showing Argentinian superstar Lionel Messi pointing a gun at a referee… Yes, you did read that correctly.

He then moves on to the ‘little known incident’ between Son Heung-Min and Antonio Rudiger, in which the Korean famously received a red card for violent conduct after decapitating the German defender. Wait, that doesn’t sound right.

Next up in the thread, Adam offers some solid advice to YouTubers to ‘get creative’ but not ‘over the top’. So why not create an image of a flash flood that submerged nearly all of Turin and almost drowned