Produced by ITV Sport Production, ITV Sport is presenting the FIFA World Cup 2026 live from New York City for the duration of the tournament. Its rooftop studio overlooks the famous Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan itself, combining both that real-world view with a virtual studio that continues the story of the location, bringing viewers at home in the UK a taste of the States.
Finding the perfect view
ITV Sport started looking for a location for its studio in the Manhattan area around two years ago. At the end of the 2024 Euro the team began discussing what they needed, and then contacted ITV America to help in the search. ITV Sport sent ITV America content showing many of its previous projects at major events, including the Berlin-based UEFA Euro 2024 studio and the FIFA World Cup 2018 studio in Russia, to demonstrate the space required. ITV America came up trumps with around 15 potential locations, which the team then went to view.
From the studio in Brooklyn, Paul McNamara, executive director and producer at ITV Sport Production, ITV Sport, says of that recce trip to pick a location: “Tony [Cahalane, technical director at ITV Sport], Chris Hollier [ITV Sport’s lead lighting and camera operator for the World Cup], and a few others came out to the US for a week to look at these 15 buildings. We got off the plane and this was the first building that we saw,” he says of where the presentation team is now based.
“Our first reaction was, “oh my god!” because not only did it have a wonderful view, it had an empty warehouse space below, so instantly you could see, “this is where the remote gallery could be, this is where the green room could be, this is where the office space would work, this is where the refs room could be”. It was just a perfect setup. We went viewed the other 13 or 14 locations, and although there were some fabulous views, there wasn’t anything that was quite as good or as suitable as this.”
Continues McNamara: “We were delighted with it because normally you go to these platforms and any number of things are an issue; there’s an air conditioning unit there or a supporting structure here. This was perfect, absolutely perfect.
“I often said to people, “if Carlsberg made spaces to build on, this was it!”. But then we had to make sure that we made the most of it and got the best out of it, and I think with all the planning that the team did and the brilliant set design that Toby Kalitowski and Jim Mann came up with, we can actually say, “yes, we’ve got this exactly the way we wanted it and hoped it would be”.”
Building the set
The studio set is built on a three metre high mod truss and scaffolding structure on the roof of the building. The high structure was necessary in order to give fans at home the backdrop of the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan skyline which are striking such a cord with viewers.
McNamara explains: “The structure that we have is not on the flat roof. We’ve built up three metres from it, so if you were to look below our studio floor to the existing floor, you’d see just a mesh of scaffold. When we had chosen this location and after extensive testing, Chris Hollier was able to confirm, “we’re going to need to come up; if you want to get the Statue of Liberty over Mark’s shoulder, you’ve got to be a certain amount of metres up. If we want the traffic coming behind and the headlights coming behind the presenters’ necks and heads rather than around the back of their chair, we’ll need to be higher,” so to maximise the position we had to build up.
“In order to do that, that’s a lot of permits and hoops to jump through, and that’s a lot of organisation across multiple permitting bodies. That’s been a massive amount of work for the PM team, but worth it in the end!
Adds McNamara: “That’s where massive credit goes to Gabby Houghton, Sarah Howard and Tony; you know how difficult it is to build a house at home and get people on site at the same time, and at the right time with the right permits and the right kit. Well, imagine doing that thousands of miles away from home.”
Putting in so much effort, from finding the perfect location through to then raising the floor by three metres, is all worthwhile for the perfect programme, says McNamara: “If you’re going to invest in coming this far and presenting the whole show from the US, then you’ve got to maximise the potential. That’s the beauty of us all working in a team together and having done a lot of tournaments together; we’re all about maximising the potential of what we’ve got and this fantastic space.”
Blending real and virtual
The studio itself is a combination of the ‘real’, taking in those expansive Manhattan skylines as well as the sounds of Brooklyn from the streets below, and the ‘unreal’, maxing out the space by using virtual reality (VR) to literally augment the experience for viewers at home, as well as the creative opportunities for editorialising.
McNamara says on the vision for the studio: “We wanted to create a 360 vista, so we had the ‘real’ view, but we also wanted to create an unreal backdrop, like a perfect loft apartment. So that was my brief to the designers: “I’m living in the best loft department in New York and I walk out onto my balcony and I’ve got the best view, but inside I’ve got this wonderful space to play with”.
“We had great fun picking our favourite album covers and favourite footballers to populate the backgrounds with,” he continues on the design of the virtual side of the studio. “You’ll see in the background there’s images of Taxi Driver with Robert de Niro, there’s specific pieces of art that are related to America and New York, there’s Diego Maradona, who’s just an iconic World Cup and footballing figure. We wanted to make a complete canvas and integrate the real and the unreal.”
The real background behind the football presenters, for instance, also includes virtual ‘screens’ that the director of the programme is able to use as part of the production, showing aspects of a game, fans reaction, street scene, and more.
Continues McNamara on the blend of real and unreal: “We’re here for five weeks doing 52 programmes. If I just sat on a wide angle of the studio, I’s get bored and perhaps the viewers would get a little bit too. So as a director that 360 view gives me options. I populated the real background with unreal ‘screens’ and had them fixed into certain buildings and scenarios, so it also gives me a background to be able to come off VT, show that background, or go to the match via. More options for us as directors, and more options to entertain the viewer.”
Adds Tony Cahalane, technical director at ITV Sport, speaking to SVG Europe from the studio: “I think when we blend the real and the unreal, it works really well. When you’re completely VR, there’s a lack of atmosphere to it, its clinical. But when you blend them together, you can achieve some really good results, to the point where we’ve got a camera which is just shooting the sky, which then paints the skylights in the virtual world that you see in the roof of the apartment.”
Creating the studio
On how that blend of real and virtual has been achieved, Cahalane explains: “We’re using AE Live. We’ve got five VR engines and we’re using StypeGrip technology for tracking, so we’re camera tracking, but we’re also using spider arrays on cameras as well, because we’re doing something which isn’t something that’s really been done well before, which is to go from an inside environment to an outside, and back again. That’s been very tricky to achieve. We did some tests in London, trying to simulate daylight at various levels, the heights of the sun, and so on, so we were in a good place when we came here, but it’s still been challenging! We’re there now and it’s working very well.”
The set designers are Jim Mann who designed the unreal aspects of the set, and Toby Kalitowski designed the real elements. However, from the first ideas through to tweaking and refining the set live in Brooklyn, it has been about teamwork.
McNamara explains, referring to Kalitowski and Mann: “They worked in tandem the whole time, the idea being that any join or blend was seamless. With AE Live as well, the group have been working for over a year together. It wasn’t the unreal person delivering and then the real world designer delivering and finding, “oh, this isn’t syncing up”. This has evolved from total synchronicity from the beginning.”
Adds Cahalane on the team of Kalitowski and Mann: “That was an early decision. Chris Hollier – DOP – myself and Maca [McNamara] went for breakfast to discuss how the set could be achieved, and it was quite clear that that pairing was paramount.”
The ITV Sport team plus Kalitowski and Mann are a proven ticket to success, having worked together before. Says McNamara: “We created our virtual studio at Timeline TV for the UEFA Euro 2024 with Toby [Kalitowski] and Jim [Mann] and Chris Hollier and Andrew Cottey DOP, and obviously Tony and myself. It’s a really good team and we’ve been backed up brilliantly by the two production managers [for this World Cup], Sarah Howard and Gabby Houghton who’ve just been amazing; they’ve been running along with the programme the whole time. So a small team, but very effective and very dedicated.”
The studio and layout around the studio are based on a collaborative, multi-layered scaled diagram coordinated by highly regarded team member, Gavin Rilley, the Gaffer spark. The diagram is used by everyone to feed into in layers, from everything including the rigging, lighting, air con, power, set design and virtual set design, so, says Cahalane, “nothing will slip as it’s all on the same document in scale”.
McNamara was in charge of the overall look and concept of the studio and how it will look on screen, from titles graphics and set design, to delivery.
He says: “I was responsible for the studio concept and everything from graphics to the way that the show is structured, how it looks, and editorially how we design that look and feel.”
Studio location audio
Being on site in Brooklyn gives the production all the sounds as well as the sights of Manhattan. Says Cahalane: “Visually, we’re embracing the backdrop. What we’ve done is embrace that with sound as well. We are genuinely mixing in a stereo landscape of sound behind the presenters, behind the guests so we can immerse the audience in the feel of the city.”
Adds McNamara on the sounds of the city: “There’s also some of the more obvious actuality, which you cannot get away from; when a fire engine goes down the street beside us, you hear the fire engine. You hear the helicopters come in because Donald Trump’s coming to see the Knicks play, and up to five helicopters come in before he does. It’s pretty cool.”
Says Cahalane on the audio: “We’re able to acoustically dry up the studio enough that we’re in control of what that level [of city noise] is, so we can make it clear for the broadcast. The only issues we’ve had have been a couple of problems with RF spectrum. It’s like the Wild West for RF here, a little bit; you can’t licence for radio mics, so we’ve had to couple of RF issues where somebody’s turned on something in the area, but we’re constantly analysing it with a spectrum analyser and tweaking things around. But there’s plenty of spares and there’s plenty of capacity to get past issues.”
Show on the road
Now that the show is most definitely on the road, McNamara is continuously honing the studio and the programme. He explains: “I spend my time here [in Brooklyn] coming up with silly ideas about how we can improve it all the time, and how we can integrate more of the set into the programme.”
McNamara also directs the shows and along with two other directors, is literally controlling what is seen at home by ITV’s viewers, as the three take it in turns in the directors’ chair.
“I don’t want to be in the back of the gallery, sitting on my hands going and back street driving, so I get to conceptualise the look and then I get to actually make it happen in a live environment, which I still really love and enjoy,” McNamara says.
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