Football Summit 2025: Tools, techniques and teamwork helping to achieve cost-effective football coverage

As part of the Production Workshops programme held during SVG Europe’s Football Summit, which took place at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium on 20 March, a panel session entitled Cost Effective Football Coverage drew on the input of broadcast service providers and a football association to explore the capture and distribution of high-quality coverage when budgets are limited.

The panel comprised Jack McGill, CEO of QTV; Alex Dowding, CIO of Wheelchair Football Association; Jacob Larsson, technical manager of NEP Norway; and Selwyn Jans, director solutions engineering at Haivision, which also sponsored the session.

Beginning with a question about the largest expenses involved in covering football, McGill was in no doubt: “People. The human cost of putting on broadcasts is the single biggest cost, and I don’t limit that just to the cost of hiring in an individual freelancer. Health and safety costs and management costs are all greater with more people. There are also multiple points of possible failure. People are fallible, so they get ill, they get caught in traffic jams – all of these things happen.”

Much of the session focused on how productions can be streamlined via the use of compact workflows and multi-skilled personnel. Dowding provided a superb example with his explanation of the Wheelchair Football Association’s production methods. “We are very niche, entirely run on volunteers, so we don’t have a big human cost, but the resilience you then need to build the systems when you are relying on volunteers is quite significant,” he said, noting that the team is regularly required to cover 28 games over two days on 10 occasions per year.

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Because of this, the entire workflow can now be operated from an iPhone or iPad, with the whole kit for two courts able to be set up in just 25 minutes. As well as allowing coverage to be captured easily and cost-efficiently, the workflow is also the result of a “realisation a few years ago that we wanted to make the workflow for production more accessible. You can have the commentator drive up in the chair, pick up the headset and iPad, start up the live stream, run the graphics, look at the league table and so on, then end the stream and go off again.”

The ‘upskilling’ that this approach calls for was echoed by McGill in his discussion of QTV’s production of matches such as those included in the Scottish Professional Football Association. “It’s a recurring theme for second or third tier sports that you require multi-skilled operators,” he confirmed. “Now you know that this is finding unicorns like that coming out of colleges and universities, but it is the path to cost-effective production for lower league football.”

Not that you could reasonably expect people to hit the ground running in all of these disciplines from the start. “Sixteen years ago I was lead commentator on a cricket event as well as being the vision mixer and graphics operator,” recalled McGill. “In that kind of environment you quickly discover who has what it takes and who doesn’t. But as a responsible employer you’re not asking people to do it all from day one; you’re gradually doing more over time and going through different stages of development.”

Culture is everything

Inevitably, some personnel will be more able to work in multiple capacities than others. “You could look at it from the perspective that the training curve for that one individual is steeper, or you could look at it that you have three training curves for three individuals in completely different disciplines,” said McGill. “But I think as long as you’re taking care of your talent pipeline then it’s fine, and the constant process of pulling people through that graduation up the stages looks after itself. It’s also a balance between staff and freelancers, as any facilities company or production company will know. You’re always trying to find a balance between those people that you can utilise on a staff rota and those people that you have to hire in and rely on on a freelance basis.”

When it comes to altering the workflow – as has happened with NEP Norway’s automation system for football production – it’s also vital to maintain the team spirit. “We actually did this implementation during Covid, when there was no opportunity to meet up with operators. The training was done on Teams, then they went off with their laptops – ‘good luck’!” recalled Larsson. “But they managed because we have put a lot of effort and time into developing and making sure that we are holding your hand on the way out there, making sure that whatever you do you cannot mess up, and helping them in that way.”

There was a consensus that getting the culture right in the company is critical. “Culture is everything,” affirmed McGill. “To use the old analogy, success on the pitch relies on the right culture off the pitch.” He also expanded upon the subject of best practice, noting that you also need great talent back at the broadcast centre and “a workflow that allows you to do as much as possible from that central position” – noting that BT Media & Broadcast’s network and the use of JPEG XS vision feeds underpin all of QTV’s remote production in Scotland.

Life after live

As the session neared its end, there was discussion around how some current industry trends, including cloud, might impact cost-effective football production. Jans indicated that there will continue to be “different tools that fit various needs, although the camera is always going to be on the ground, and then you have to look at how you tie everything together.” He confirmed that there is a lot of interest in the open source video transport protocol SRT for remote production, offering scope for “gluing the ground to the cloud, with SRT offering advantages, including those from a cost perspective”.

McGill said that he favoured “the expression ‘cloud pragmatic’… I think there are certain things that cloud lends itself to, and the simplicity of production is one way to look at it. Cloud might not be so good for complex OBs – it might lose efficacy and cost-effectiveness – but for single or multi-skilled operator production it could be good.”

There was also a view that cloud is useful for the quick turnaround of content for social media and other platforms as the post-live factor becomes more important. “It’s not just about live; it’s also about ‘life after live’ and what you do with that content in order to create a long-tail of engagement. How to do that is a big ongoing thing,” noted McGill.