Months before Manchester City striker Erling Haaland went megaviral during the 2026 World Cup, WME brought him into its Creator Labs to help launch his YouTube channel and monetize it with brand sponsorships.
Haven’t heard of Creator Labs? That’s because WME has just unveiled it.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, the new arm of WME’s Digital Division will serve as an in-house operations and production team intended to help creators build and scale their online presences into full-fledged media businesses.
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Haaland (who now has 4.5 million subs on YouTube) was one of the team’s first partners, along with comedian Julian Shapiro-Barnum.
WME told THR it helped Shapiro-Barnum get multiple sponsorships for the launch of his late-night-style webseries, Outside Tonight with Julian Shapiro-Barnum. That show’s dedicated channel has a little over 7,000 subscribers.
Creator Labs handles virtually everything for clients across channel management, production, and distribution. WME says it participates in the very early ideation phase for a channel, and once the channel is live, it offers production services, video posting, and syndicated distribution, plus the aforementioned sponsorship-securing.
“This was largely a reaction to the state of the entertainment industry and the marketplace where we find ourselves, where YouTube has in many ways deconstructed all the different pieces that you have in what historically was a network or distribution operation and put that in the hands of the creator,” Jad Dayeh, Senior Partner and Co-Head of WME’s Digital Media Division, told THR.
Ben Davis, Dayeh’s fellow Co-Head, added, “We’ve been investing in it and building this out slowly over the past couple years and testing and iterating around it and have found traction born out of how do we evolve our services for this new day and age? Our clients now own their distribution, so how does the role of an agent change.”
WME, which laid off 30 staffers in March to “[reduce] layers, [increase] responsibilities, and [remove] bureaucracy,” hired 11 people to support Creator Labs and its adjacent team Creator Sales.
Simultaneously, WME announced it’s invested in social video company Astra Media; Astra has worked with celebs including Khloe Kardashian and Kevin Hart. Details about that partnership are slim.
Having Haaland as proof-in-the-pudding is an impressive start for Creator Labs, and we won’t be surprised if sports is one of the division’s main focuses, considering WME represents hundreds of athletes in major sports leagues and disciplines.
YouTube is hungry for sports rights, so if WME can repeat what it did with Haaland and tie the rise of athletes’ channels to digital-aired games and tournaments, it might ride at the top of the ever-swelling social sports wave.
