Sports TV Awards 2021 Finalist: Predictions Eredivisie by Sportdigital FUSSBALL

Sportdigital FUSSBALL, Eredivisie, IMG Media, Pes Productions, Konami, and AccuScore used cutting-edge augmented reality to play out the cancelled 2020 football season

Credit:Sportdigital FUSSBALL (2021)

Bringing cutting-edge technology to the beautiful game, Sportdigital FUSSBALL and partners have earned themselves a coveted place on the prestigious SVG Europe Sports TV Awards 2021 shortlist for ‘Outstanding Production Achievement – Innovation’.

What if… in football is usually a pointless discussion, because sport by its very nature has an outcome. Not for Sportdigital FUSSBALL. When the 2020 Dutch Eredivisie league was terminated prematurely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hamburg-based pay-TV operator developed an innovative broadcasting format using a mix of match data, augmented reality, and real archive match images, and simply continued to play the cancelled season.

For its innovative Predictions Eredivisie format, Sportdigital FUSSBALL cooperated with a range of partners including IMG Media and Pes Productions. The sports simulation company AccuScore provided match data to realistically simulate the results of the Eredivisie. The video game manufacturer Konami supplied virtual match images for the highlight summaries of match days via its game ‘Pro Evolution Soccer‘. These virtual clips were then mixed in post-production with real archive images from the Eredivisie, generating new and unique highlight summaries for matches that had never actually existed in the real world.

The winners of the SVG Europe Sports TV Awards 2021, sponsored by Canon, will be announced on Thursday 28 October at Chelsea F.C. during the Sport Production & Technology Summit 2021. Registration for both events is now open to members and sponsors here.