More than 20 games in the English Football League are underway and a cry of “it’s gone” bellows from Pod J.
Panic sets in.
Peter Walker dashes in to check what has happened, fearing a camera has gone down in Stevenage’s home game against Huddersfield Town in League One.
After a brief exchange, the panic is over. It was a false alarm. A player appeared to have an injury and the match director feared their hamstring had gone as opposed to losing a camera feed.
Welcome to IMG Studios, where Walker, an executive producer, is six hours into a 12-hour day overseeing production of every single fixture in the English Football League (EFL, levels two to four in the pyramid), whether beamed live on Sky Sports+, Wrexham being broadcast on CBS, or Middlesbrough taking centre stage at Cosm in the United States.
From commentators working in soundproofed booths to match directors taking charge of on-site camera operators in the stadium, IMG Studios is the global hub of EFL football, and arguably one of the biggest and slickest remote production operations in sport.
On a busy Saturday afternoon, The Athletic is here to soak it all in.
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The EFL’s five-year broadcast deal with Sky Sports kicked in at the start of the 2024-25 season. The broadcaster is paying more than £900million ($1.15bn) to show 1,059 of the league’s 1,891 Championship, League One, League Two, Carabao Cup and EFL Trophy matches.
To cope with the volume of matches they had just paid for, Sky Sports launched Sky Sports+, a new platform that can show up to 100 live events via concurrent streams. Of the 1,891 fixtures, Sky is producing 193, while IMG agreed to remotely produce 1,698 games a season.
Ben Wright, the EFL’s chief commercial officer, told The Athletic that the EFL wanted to be “bold” in its approach when giving its clubs greater exposure — be it in the UK or internationally — which is something he is confident this deal is doing.
IMG’s quality control area (Dan Sheldon/The Athletic)
For IMG, the EFL’s production partner, this meant a significant upgrade to the previous offering. Championship fixtures would now have six cameras (up from four), with two of them being fixed pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ); League One games would have four cameras (up from one); and League Two ties are covered by two cameras (up from one).
To ensure this was deliverable before the 2024-25 season, IMG and the EFL spent the summer digging up stadiums to install new hardwire and the PTZ cameras in Championship venues.
“The engineering team didn’t see much of their families over the summer,” Walker says. “They’re doing that across 72 stadiums, which is a challenge. But that means on a Saturday, a camera operator can turn up three hours before kick-off and plug in.”
So, on a busy Saturday, what does that look like? As you enter IMG’s studios in Stockley Park — located only 15 minutes away from London’s Heathrow Airport and the home of VAR, although that is in a different building — and walk up one flight of stairs, you are greeted by the EFL’s logo. This is the nerve centre of its remote production.
Multiple screens in the quality control area are showing live feeds of matches. There are two dozen pods in which games are being produced — 12 for the Championship and 12 for League One, while League Two fixtures are produced on a desk partitioned into sections.
In each pod is a match director and a replay operator. The replay ops is providing replays and adding graphics, while the match director, as the title suggests, directs the match, cutting to different camera angles.
For League Two fixtures, one person is responsible for all of it. Walker describes the League Two area as his “favourite”, adding that they are doing “probably the toughest job in the building”.
A large part of IMG’s EFL production is carried out by freelancers, with Mike Deppe, IMG’s technical producer, booking in people for each matchday two to three months in advance. Then, around 10 days before, Deppe will assign them to the games they will cover.
In one of the pods is Emma Josling, who is directing Luton Town’s game against Portsmouth. At just after 1pm, she has finished her pre-match checks. In her notes are the names and phone numbers of her four camera operators, a self-drawn map of where the cameras are located at Kenilworth Road, and the team news.
Josling directing Luton’s 1-0 win against Portsmouth (Dan Sheldon/The Athletic)
Communication between Josling, who is softly spoken and calmly reassuring, and her camera operators during the match is pivotal to a successful remote production. “If you’re at the ground and doing a big OB (outside broadcast),” she says, “you’d have a floor manager there who would tell you everything, from when the teams are ready to come out to when a substitute is warming up, so you can then warn the camera operators and commentary team. Being remote, you rely on your cameras to spot things.”
The 12.30pm kick-offs are beginning to end, and Cameron Pope emerges from a booth looking exhausted having just commentated on Birmingham City’s 1-0 home win against Wycombe Wanderers, which was broadcast on CBS. He takes a large swig of water, ruffles his hair and exhales. After five minutes to decompress, he sits down.
“It’s a different skill, but you can’t be a commentator if you can’t do off-tube commentary (remote via screens rather than at the ground), so it’s something you have to learn,” Pope says.
No commentators are on-site if IMG produces the EFL match, and not all games are assigned one. The 3pm kick-offs which are not going out on the world feed and will not be shown in the UK due to the 3pm blackout rule will go without one. For the 10-minute highlights package that comes after, commentary will be added.
Importantly, the cameras’ microphones pick up the crowd noise, enabling the commentators to react to the sound of the crowd, projecting their voice when necessary to capture the excitement.
“We’ve had some commentary out on site this year,” Walker explains. “It’s something that we’ve got a solution for but for now, we’re in season one and it’s a lot more controllable here for the time being.”
With Pope’s game being broadcast on Sky Sports+ and CBS, he has to navigate two audiences.
Pope commentating on Birmingham’s top-of-the-table clash against Wycombe in League One (Dan Sheldon/The Athletic)
“If you’re doing a game involving Wycombe Wanderers, who play in Buckinghamshire, you have to get across to an American audience where they are without patronising the UK audience, so it’s a balance,” Pope adds.
“You’ve got to think of pop culture references. You can’t say things such as, ‘They are as frequent as London buses’, because if someone has never been to London, they won’t know what you are on about.
“But I’m not going to call it soccer, for example, because that would alienate so much of the audience.”
Arriving back at the Luton vs Portsmouth pod, Josling is in full swing. “Great shot, Gerry,” she says to one of her four camera operators.
Due to there not being a commentator for this game, and with Josling preferring an environment where she can listen to the match, she has the local BBC radio commentary playing in the pod.
There is an issue, though. The tallies on the cameras — the lights that indicate that any particular camera is broadcasting live at that point — are having technical issues. An engineer hurries over. For now, Josling needs to talk more, constantly informing her camera operators when they are live and when she has moved on. There isn’t a simple fix and they end up having to deal with it for the remainder of the game.
At the end of the match, Josling thanks her team. “Well played with that,” she says, signing off with, “tally-ho, tally-no” in a nod to their technical problems.
The 3pm kick-offs end, but highlights packages need to be delivered to clubs within three hours of the final whistle. More than 400 files, containing two- and 10-minute highlights packages, will be sent to clubs. The PGMOL, the refereeing body, receives every angle from each game to analyse the officiating.
The engineering area (Dan Sheldon/The Athletic)
There are weekly chats and lots of WhatsApp groups between IMG, Sky Sports, CBS and the EFL. It is a significant undertaking, but the early signs are positive.
“In this new deal, there’s a chance for every single EFL club to be shown at least 20 times a season, which is incredible,” explains Yath Gangakumaran, executive director of commercial at Sky. “And that’s actually more than some Premier League teams are shown on TV.
So far, Gangakumaran says, “10 million people have watched some EFL coverage” on TV this season, with “viewership hours up 32 per cent”. Sky expects these figures to increase as the EFL races towards its conclusion, culminating in the play-off finals at the end of May. Gangakumaran also notes that, on average, people are watching Sky Sports+ through the TV for “one hour”, and for “40 minutes” via their mobile device.
“What it tells us is that football fans are mad passionate about football and will watch their club if the opportunity to do so is there,” says Gary Hughes, Sky Sports’ director of football.
Wright says the EFL hasn’t “seen any negative impact on attendances” as a result of the increased broadcast output, adding that the five-year deal “has delivered increased revenues and awareness” for the clubs, while “helping to grow the EFL’s brand and audience” globally.
“And as we did for this deal, we want to be at the very forefront of broadcast innovation so that we’re able to evolve and adapt to the changing ways that people watch and follow sport in the future,” Wright says.
Asked whether they would have done anything differently, Hughes suggests they may not have “front-loaded the season” with “so many games”.
Despite programming more games than they had perhaps planned for, Hughes added that they have enough fixtures in the bank to tell all the stories as they develop between now and the end of May.
“We’ll learn from that going forward in terms of what we’ve got left for the rest of the season, but we’re fine, we’ve managed it,” Hughes says.
The League Two area (Dan Sheldon/The Athletic)
As The Athletic departs IMG Studios on Saturday evening, it remains a hive of activity. ITV’s EFL highlights show is being worked on upstairs, and engineers are going from pod to pod seeking technical feedback.
Walker is still several hours from calling it a day and, bar the odd technical hiccup and an early scare in the Stevenage match, it was a smooth production day.
“It’s such a cool production to be involved in because it’s the way that lots of leagues and federations are looking at their products now,” Walker says. “To do this at scale, you also have to think about things differently. And this is a really cool, innovative production that no one else is doing at this scale.”
Even though there are many more Saturday-Tuesday match days to go before the EFL campaign ends, Walker and his team are thinking about next season, seeking ways to take their production to the next level.
Whether it is CBS asking for a 3pm Saturday fixture only a few hours before kick-off, leaving Deppe scrambling to source a commentator, or a power cut at a stadium, there is nothing quite like expecting the unexpected when remotely producing more than 1,600 EFL games a season.
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(Top photo: The pods; by Dan Sheldon/The Athletic)
