The Sidemen vs YouTube All-Stars: Marrying pro-soccer coverage with creator presentation

It’s football but not as we know it. The Sidemen vs YouTube All-Stars charity soccer match was a mash-up of conventional live broadcast and creator innovation with audience engagement on a level that bosses at TNT Sports, Sky Sports and the EPL will surely have noticed.

Even the Carabao Cup Final couldn’t match the degree of interest in the amateur sporting event held a week earlier at Wembley Stadium. Featuring MrBeast, Speed, Logan Paul, KSI and other off-the-scale social media stars, the Sidemen Charity Match packed 90,000 fans into Wembley on 8 March to watch the YouTube Allstars beat Sidemen FC 5-4 on penalties after a thrilling 9-9 draw required spot kicks.

Another 2.5 million watched live on YouTube, while 17 million and counting tuned in to on-demand streams for an event that raised nearly £5 million for charity.

It’s the sixth such charity match since 2016, all broadcast on YouTube, with three being hosted at Charlton Athletic (in 2017, 2018 and 2022) followed by London Stadium in 2023.

Production company After Party Studios (APS) was hired by Sidemen Entertainment in 2022 to deliver the last three events. “The goal was to give the match the limelight it deserves, to cover it just like a top flight football game,” explains Joshua Barnett managing director at After Party Studios. “At the same time, we wanted to get into the heart of the action and make sure we’re not missing an opportunity to grab a creator, a YouTuber, at any moment.”

APS is also behind sports entertainment series and digital content including Sky Sports’ SCENES, which now has over 101 million views, and League of 72 for Sky Bet and the EFL.

“There was no point in trying to half bake it,” he adds. “We wanted to go to the best people and get the best technology we could find.”

Line producer Andy Wood, lead creative producer Amanda Cox and multicam director Matthew Amos were lynchpins of this and two previous Sidemen Charity matches.

“Every year the innovation has jumped up,” explains Wood, who is also a partnerships director at full-service production company Spiritland Productions. “For the match in 2022 we had a jib on the pitch and used cinematic lenses for presentation. The opening link in 2023 was from a drone with presenters on the roof of the London Stadium. No-one’s ever done that before. This year was a chance to build on that.”

The game was captured at 1080p50 from 32 cameras including standard Sony HDC-3500s (some with super slo availability) and Panasonic UE150 PTZs on commentators and in the dressing rooms. Canon CN7 cinematic lenses were added to three Sony F55 RF handheld cameras for pitchside interviews displayed picture in picture during the game and set up to roam from arrivals, to tunnel and dressing rooms.

Taking inspiration from depth of field cameras on the try line in Six Nations coverage, a A7SII gimbal camera was bought in on arrivals, goal celebrations and even onto the field to film goal celebrations. A pair of Steadicams, one with cinematic lens, were also given freedom to roam, including on the field during penalties.

“It’s not about the tech alone,” says Barnett. “It’s about how the players – and referee Mark Clattenburg – interacted with the tech. This is what creators do exceptionally well all year round. The collaboration with creators is immense. If we came up with ideas for cameras then they were buying into it, or they were suggesting toys and we would find a way to make it happen.”

GoPros on selfie sticks were one such idea. This came into its own during penalties when creator/player Max Fosh filmed reactions as his team scored penalties. “He could see his own reactions displayed live on the big screen, which was incredible,” Barnett says.

A refcam, which featured in previous Sidemen matches, had a 3D printed mould attachment to stabilise images. Clattenburg also gave out medals on the Wembley gantry with shots from the refcam giving a unique view as the medals were placed over player’s heads.

A drone supplied by Aerios Solutions was flown in-stadium for pre-records the day before and another one flown externally during the match. This was an eight rotor Neo drone built by Acecore Technologies fully integrated with NEP kit for reliable setup and which delivers “really smooth footage” due to the tuning of the gimbals and flight computers.

A polecam was deployed to capture the classic team arrival shots of the coaches – positioned at the level of the coach windows. These shots were then rendered with 3D effects and input to EVS ready for playout into the live broadcast.

The polecam was also used inside the stadium. “You absolutely feel like you are experiencing the heart of the action, the fans in the stadium, the players coming out, the trophy celebrations,” says Wood. “We planned to use more of these shots in the post-match wrap but because the game went to penalties we ran out of time, so we’re going to send them to the Sidemen team for them to post on social as another different perspective on the game.”

“There was no point in trying to half bake it. We wanted to go to the best people and get the best technology we could find”

The team also took maximum advantage of a Luna Falcon wirecam system, getting it down to pitch level during the penalty shoot-out.

“There’s a brilliant shot that opened the link to the commentators at the start of the game from the Falcon, spinning around Wembley and then finding the commentators in their position on the gantry,” Wood says. “Wirecam is a staple for professional soccer games, but we were allowed to do more things with it.”

Steadicams were allowed on the pitch during the penalty shoot-out and to circle goalkeeper KSI and other players as they walked towards to the ball. “You wouldn’t be allowed to circle around Mo Salah as he’s walking up to take a penalty,” says Wood. “We were getting much more into the emotions of players because of the permissions we had.”

Another enlightening scenario – which wasn’t planned – was in effect a form of VAR on the big screens. After a penalty called by Clattenburg in the second half he, like everyone else in the ground, could rewatch video of the incident on the giant screen. He realised he hadn’t got the decision right and changed his mind.

“When VAR happens in the Premier League there’s three minutes of nothingness but here it was complete crowd engagement in the officiating process,” says Wood. “What’s more, he made the right decision which we could all see on our replays.”

Spiritland Productions ran a set of RF mics with 16 channels covering the entire pitch, dressing rooms, tunnel and two presentation positions. It also managed 90 Riedel Bolero wireless intercom systems with stadium-wide coverage — all from multipurpose media production unit, Spiritland Two.

Specialist player mics were also used in game play so the audience could hear the referee, KSI and Speed on replays if the director chose. “At half time, we replayed KSI’s best vocal highlights from the game,” says Wood. “That was recorded on the EVS channel and clipped up to play back so you heard what team captains had been saying on the pitch as a little highlights package.”

The game was produced from two NEP triple expanders. Match truck Atlantic was led by director Gemma Knight (director of Women’s World Cup semi-finals) and the presentation truck Pacific was led by Amos (he also directed the live half-time performance by rapper AJ Tracey and KSI). EVS and camera ops were linked on comms to both directors.

“I spent hours on comms matrices working out who needed to listen to who,” says Wood. “That’s because while we’re cutting the match cameras we’re also putting up a PiP on screen of live pitch side interviews.”

A graphic of live charity donations was integrated into the stream managed and updated by Happy Graphics. A YouTube shop feature was timed to pop up offering limited edition merch of items like shirts, again with sales going to charity.

A low-latency SRT feed was sent to Opta Sports, about 15-20 seconds faster than the YouTube feeds, with resulting stats/GFX displayed on screen.

Intriguingly, the match KO was 3pm Saturday, conventionally a black out time for broadcasters to preserve the slot for match attendance.

It was however the only gap in Wembley’s busy schedule. Barnett explains. “After the London Stadium in September 2023 was a 60,000 sellout the question was how do you raise the game from there? You go to Wembley, of course. So, we spoke to Wembley and their next viable date was 8 March 2025. The one after that was in November. The Sidemen didn’t want to wait that long, so 8 March 3pm it was.”

A big part of Barnett’s role on the day was talent wrangling. “I get to stroll around the Wembley pitch speaking to some of the biggest YouTubers on the planet. However, not all of the crew or floor managers know who these people are. They’ve got cheat sheets showing faces but in the moment you need to be able to go up to Logan Paul or MrBeast and get them to be on the live stream at any minute.”

Barnett is also gatekeeper of the budget and was instrumental in bringing in Footasylum to sponsor the event. Footasylum was integrated into the APS production to produce their own content from the event “in a way that most brands can only dream of”.

He says: “We were marrying the workflows of live music and entertainment shows with that of a live football match. The biggest thing for me was the reaction from A-list YouTubers themselves who told us afterwards that we had absolutely nailed it because they felt that we’d represented them in the best way and covered off all the angles.”

Barnett says mainstream broadcasters will have taken note. “Everything they aim for is to get closer to the action and closer to the characters because, ultimately, it’s the characters that make sport entertaining.”

It’s not necessarily about how many viewers the YouTube Charity Match pulled from the Premier League during its concurrent prime time, but how many new viewers it managed to attract, including those who don’t subscribe to media packages or just casual fans who like to be entertained.

As former YouTube Europe manager Paola Marinone pointed out: “It is not traditional sport against creator economy, this is the perfect experiment where traditional sport (and broadcasters) can learn what a younger audience want and can do. Now it is about applying some of the learning, with adaptation, to a traditional sport/broadcast.”