Everything Smelled of Popcorn: The Art of Bringing the Complex Sound of Esports to Fans With Sound Supervisor Matt Gilbert

Everything smelled of popcorn: The art of bringing the complex sound of esports to fans with sound supervisor Matt Gilbert By Kevin Emmott

Wednesday, December 3, 2025 - 10:48

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The Formula 1 esports Series at Fulham Broadway's Vue cinema

Sound supervisor Matt Gilbert has spent the last three decades working in live sports audio, so as demand grows for esports productions that look and sound more like live TV, Gilbert's experience has made him a go-to figure. It's the reason why he has spent the last few years bridging the worlds of traditional sports and competitive gaming, juggling audio mixes, fast-changing setups, and gaming quirks to create an atmosphere that matches the energy of a Champions League live final at Wembley.

Gilbert started his television career in the 1990s at Scanners HD in Nottingham and was drawn into live sports when the company won a football contract with BBC Wales. Quickly gaining hands-on experience in live football audio mixing and technical rigging, he expanded his skillset with the likes of Sky (cricket, rugby, football), ITV (including the Champions League), and BT Sport, and he still works with all of the above.

But as esports started gaining traction after the launch of the Twitch streaming platform in 2011, production companies started looking for people to bridge techniques from traditional sports into this new - but still basically scrappy - esports thing.

Having a background in both sports and in presentation turned out to be a useful combination, but the early years of esports was a far cry away from the glamour of the Champions League.

Matt Gilbert has spent the last three decades working in live sports audio, and has segued smoothly into esports

Everything smelled of popcorn

In 2017 I was doing the BT Premier League football and the BT Champions League with Dickie Day, a well-known presentation director, says Gilbert. That same year he was asked to direct the Gfinity Elite League, an early FIFA football esports tournament. The producers wanted to make it less like a YouTube presentation and more like a TV show, so Dickie was drafted in, and so was I.

The entire presentation was filmed at Fulham Broadway's Vue cinema. Gfinity had hired a single cinema screen just to do esports; they built a studio set in front of the screen for guests, and they built camera platforms off to the side where the commentators could stand. I worked on a little Behringer desk which was part of a flyaway kit shoehorned between rows of projectors at the back of the cinema, where you could hear all the films on either side of you. And everything smelled of popcorn!

That cinema was actually the UK's first dedicated esports venue and the Gfinity Championships covered a variety of games including F1 Racing, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Hearthstone as well as FIFA, and it attracted millions of viewers from the get-go. Gfinity was doing a lot of work to get some momentum, and it was broadcast live on YouTube, Twitch and Facebook.

It was an auspicious start: I'm always baffled that we were even doing some of the stuff that we were doing, but when you see the viewing figures they are in the same region as Premier League games, and they get millions of views as people watch it on You Tube after the fact, says Gilbert.

The Formula 1 esports Series at Fulham Broadway's Vue cinema

A similar approach

Fast forward eight years, and Gilbert is still juggling actual sport with esports. In fact, esports is more popular than ever, and the venues have shifted from a single cinema screen in Southwest London to some of the UK's most respected broadcast facilities; this year Gilbert has worked on EA FC Pro live broadcasts in TC1 at London's Television Centre and at Dock10 in Salford.

Post-Covid, Gilbert says the last few years has seen a resurgence in the amount of esports work he is offered; so much so that esports can often clash with real life football mixing for TNT and Champions League presentation coverage for US broadcaster CBS. Scheduling clashes aside, it is this experience that is the reason why he is in such demand, as companies like EA seek to produce esports coverage that look and sound more like a live sporting event.

Gilbert's approach is pretty similar to how he would approach a football match; it's all about getting the right information up front. In esports, audio routing and source management can be as much of a game as the content, managing audio from multiple simultaneous games, players, presenters and commentators, and dealing with dynamic assignments and frequent changes. And that's in addition to associating the correct microphones with the right cameras and players, which can be especially complex with PTZ cameras and shifting studio setups.

Dock 10 is such a big studio and this year they had nine games going on at once, which means 18 players, 18 games console feeds and 18 reaction mics coming into the desk, plus 10 presenters. The more information you can get in advance, the more you can whittle down the resources you need.

For example, I don't need reaction mics on the games that don't have PTZ cameras on the players, because they can be covered by a roaming camera which has its own associated mic. Meanwhile, I'll place a small microphone hidden under the monitor for the main games that have dedicated PTZ cameras in order to capture more detailed reactions of the players.

For these key games each player has two associated PTZ cameras, one on either side so they can switch the player's profile in the second half, so in reality the audio requirements for each player are exactly half as complicated as the camera requirements, but it still takes some working out.

Because we associate the same mic for both cameras it sometimes takes VT a bit of time to fo

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