Bigger, better, more: How IMG is upping production values for its remote EFL coverage, and increasing job opportunities at the same time
IMG’s English Football League (EFL) production contract is a large-scale undertaking that utilises interesting broadcasting and connectivity technology and services, and has a useful additional benefit for the wider industry in the form of creating new job opportunities. One week into the new season, SVG Europe caught up with Peter Walker, senior producer, and Brian Leonard, head of engineering, to find out more about how it is done.
The start of the 2024-25 EFL season (9 August 2024) brought with it not just excitement and anticipation for supporters of the 72 clubs that make up the second, third and fourth tiers of football in England – it also heralded a new era for televised coverage and distribution of the matches.
Domestically in the UK, 1059 games in the EFL, EFL Cup and EFL Trophy will be broadcast exclusively across existing Sky Sports channels or live via the new Sky Sports+ streaming platform.
Of those, after securing a new 5-year deal, IMG will produce 866 matches per season for Sky with the remaining balance produced by the pay-TV broadcaster for its main channel output.
IMG will produce a further 832 fixtures, making it 1698 in total, which will be shown outside of the UK via EFL rights holders Pitch International and Relevent Sports, who will distribute the feeds across the world. Clubs will also be able to offer their own output via their international streaming services to their fans outside of the UK. IMG is also producing a free-to-air terrestrial highlights programme for ITV.
“We’ve been around all 72 stadiums, travelling over 80,000 miles, to upgrade the infrastructure and instal 25,000 meters of cabling, so that we can do the increased camera production”
Not only is there an increase in the volume of matches being produced but the production values are being upped too. The big change is more cameras across every division with six cameras in the Championship (seven if you include the Hawk-Eye goal technology feed), four cameras in League One and two cameras in League Two – up from four, one and one cameras respectively.
EFL Cup matches will feature at least two cameras plus an up-scaled four-camera set-up for later rounds of the competition. All EFL Trophy matches will have a one-camera setup until the semi-finals.
Outside of Sky Sports’ main TV selections, all broadcasts will also feature enriched in-game graphics, recaps and highlights.
And all of this will be done remotely, helmed from IMG’s dedicated EFL production centre at Stockley Park in West London.
The prep and the workflow
“We’ve been around all 72 stadiums, travelling over 80,000 miles, to upgrade the infrastructure and instal 25,000 meters of cabling, so that we can do [the increased camera production],” says Brian Leonard, IMG head of engineering, outlining the overall workflow. “Then we use an NEP Connect backbone to get the content back to Stockley Park.
“In each stadium, we’ve got SDI cables and fibre converters to transform the signal from the camera positions all the way back to a Cabinet. From there, we have various redundant levels of fibre on NEP’s network from 10G to 1G plus 1G that then comes back to us, which we then break out again. We have approximately 200+ incoming lines.”
To capture the action on the pitch, IMG uses FlatBack4 Productions. They supply the camera operators and the cameras.
“It’s different from an individual production, where you can be fully focused on the editorial. But our approach is to consistently produce each match in the same way, so they all look the same.”
“It’s ENG cameras for the first four cameras then we use Canon PTZ cameras for the 18-yard lines for all Championship grounds,” continues Leonard. “We can control the 18-yard lines from Stockley Park. At the moment. we’re not really utilising that as much as we would like to but that’s on the agenda further down the road.”
Each league is standardised, using the same equipment, he adds.
“In addition, every game potentially has three to four commentators. We’ve ramped up production by using a neutral commentator provided by IMG. Then there’s a home bias commentator, an away bias commentator and then on top of that, we have the clubs themselves providing their own commentary.”
All the commentary signals are delivered to IMG using SIP (Session Internet Protocol) trunking, and added to the world feed. The SIP tech replaces the old ISDN infrastructure. Commentators use IQOYA panels from Broadcast Bionics & Digigram.
Once the content arrives at Stockley Park, it goes into an IP matrix and is then routed to Riedel Simplylive production desks.
“We’ve got 38 Simplylive desks ranging from eight channel desks all the way up to 12. So, those feeds come in, and then we do four TXs per match – a broadcaster dirty, a clean, a feed to the stadiums, which is basically the world feed minus replays; and then the last one is for iFollow, the official streaming service for supporters of EFL Clubs.”
Adobe Premiere is used to cut the highlights packages with a Helmut Adobe management operation provided by Jigsaw24. Content is sent to Sky using ATEME Titan encoders, making use of Amazon Web Services.
To deal with the volume of content, there is a big team involved.
“On a typical Saturday,” explains senior producer Peter Walker, “there’ll be over 200 people, either at Stockley Park or out at the stadiums. That includes all of the camera operators, replay operators, directors, highlights editors, commentators, engineers, and the production team as well.
“For League 2, we have one operator per match at Stockley Park. For League 1 and the Championship, we have two operators – one director and one replay op. We also have talkback and Tally at the ground as well. All of this helps us to achieve a high level of production.”
Telling the story of the game
With more cameras, and more graphics, there are more opportunities for editorial decisions.
“It’s very different from an individual production, where you can be fully focused on the editorial for that,” says Walker. “But our approach is to consistently produce each match in the same way, so they all look the same. We are using extremely experienced directors, in some cases, especially across the Championship.
“We have quite big production meetings ahead of every match day, and we’ll go through the broader editorial direction we want to take. But the key is to tell the story. We want everyone to tell the story but then delve into some of those more detailed match-specific editorial threads.
Hyper Studios is the graphics supplier for IMG’s EFL output, making use of OPTA data.
“In our gallery, we squeeze into two people what a truck would do in a traditional world,” suggests Walker. “The director and/or the replay op, depending on how they’ve decided to divvy up that workflow, are also adding graphics.
“The graphics are starting to become richer. We’re starting to access more of that OPTA data and can tell some of the stories that are happening on the pitch, whether that’s completed passes, heat maps for players, and many more of those deeper data dives.”
Walker is happy with the advances made to the commentary output too.
“Previously, iFollow used club or local radio commentary which were added on top of our streams. We felt there’d be more benefit to having neutral commentators who are actually talking to the pictures as the radio commentators often didn’t have access to the actual stream. We’re providing somewhere in the region of 600 commentaries ourselves this season. The talent is booked by IMG and provided for Sky.
“Saturday [10 August] was really the first time we saw that in bulk. And it was a real elevation of the coverage for us that we could direct them, and they could see our pictures.”
Can things still be improved? Walker is convinced they can.
“It’s a beast on a Saturday when you’ve got so many games going on at one time. People are still getting up to speed with the flow of the production, but we are confident that will happen quickly and things will definitely start to develop.
“The use of graphics certainly will evolve and how we work with those 18-yard PTZ cameras. They aren’t manned at the minute but we think there’s a lot that we can that we can gain from manning those cameras and to give us more shots that will develop the editorial within games. There’s plenty of room to grow. We’ve got five years to do it! And we’re really excited about where it will take us.”
Creating job opportunities
One of the additional benefits of such a large production is the work opportunities that it affords.
“If you walk around Stockley Park on a Saturday at 3 o’clock, you’ll see such a diverse production team,” says Walker proudly. “We have experienced directors who have directed World Cup finals and Champions League finals sitting in galleries with replay operators who are very new to the industry, and they’re still learning. Over the last five years, we’ve developed some of those replay operators and they are now directing games for us. The same for camera operators. We’ve got so many of those out on the road. Because the EFL project is so big, it creates great opportunities.”
It’s a green production too, he adds.
“We don’t have engineers on site so our carbon footprint on a match day is four ENG camera operators turning up and plugging in. You’re not rolling trucks up. You’re not rolling engineers up. We try to use local camera operators. We’re trying to find a way to localise our commentary teams to negate the need for travel. I think it’s as probably as small a carbon footprint as it can have.”
“The opportunities that the EFL production gives people, along with what’s being done technically at such scale, plus the sustainability side of it. These are headlines that we are very proud of.”
IMG’s coverage of the EFL, EFL Cup and EFL Trophy continues until the end of the 2028-29 season.