FIFA Club World Cup 2025: Sounding Off With HBS at the Largest Production for a Club Competition Ever

FIFA Club World Cup 2025: Sounding off with HBS at the largest production for a club competition ever By Kevin Emmott

Monday, July 28, 2025 - 11:27

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Inside the IBC at the 2025 Club World Cup

Described by Oscar Sanchez, head of host broadcast production at FIFA, as the largest production for a club competition ever, it's easy to get lost in the numbers of this year's FIFA Club World Cup.

Previously contested by just seven teams, this year's Club World Cup was soundly reinvented. Hosted in the US for the first time and with a global audience of more than two billion people viewing matches for free through rights holder DAZN, this year's tournament boasted a brand-new format with 32 teams from 20 countries. It captured 195 goals across 63 games, and all coordinated between 12 stadiums that stretched from Miami to Seattle.

It's a lot, but in the same way as the competition pulled in teams from all over the globe, it meant there was also a diverse international mix of suppliers, technical facilities, and onsite personnel, and ensuring a consistent sound across all those different influences is a major undertaking in itself.

An international mix

It's been a real international mix of people working on the event, from sound assistants and A1's to audio guarantees, audio in charge (AIC) personnel, and intercom engineers, says Host Broadcast Service's (HBS) Jim Green, who has been assisting HBS's engineering manager Nicolas Brie in planning the audio infrastructure of the event since April. Although Green has worked alongside HBS in other capacities before, this is his first tournament working directly for them, while Brie has been the audio lead for every HBS competition for the last five years.

In addition to audio people from across Europe, we had a contingent from Australia and there have obviously been a lot of Americans on site as well, says Green. When it comes to ensuring the sound output is consistent a key challenge was the difference in style of sports mixing in the US compared to what we're used to in Europe. There is a cultural difference between a European and American approach, and we are looking for consistency across every single match from all 12 venues.

Every game is mixed in full 5.1 surround and we are looking for a balance between the stadium ambience, the commentary and the ball kicks. We need to be across how much compression is applied and how much the audio is allowed to breathe. There are lots of ways in which the mix can sound different depending on who's mixing it.

The way that HBS mitigates this is with robust audio quality control (QC) operation. Part of the QC team's job is to do the daily lineups and keep across things like the overall loudness, but a big part is to guide people in how the mix is balanced, explains Green. Every A1 was booked because they are experts at mixing live sports, so there is already a high level of what is required.

But what HBS is trying to accomplish in terms of consistency and overall style is key to the whole competition, and it is ensured in two different ways. Firstly, HBS hosts a seminar before the event with all the A1's to set out the production plan when it comes to the audio. Part of that involves a talk about the localisation of ambient sounds and the importance of capturing decorrelated audio rather than individual effects.

Secondly, and especially during the first few matches, there is a lot of live hands-on guidance because what we're asking them to do is not necessarily how they would normally approach the mix of a sports event in the US.

It's an incredibly specialist role because not only do they have to be able to recognise any differences between the mixes, but they have to understand what is causing those differences. They also need to be personable enough to tell someone how to change how they work and gently guide them towards achieving a consistent mix. And all while building that relationship over a four-wire comms system!

Adapting for soccer

Achieving that perfect, decorrelated, ambient soundscape created another challenge for Green and Brie, because producing international football in the US is not only about making sure that cultural differences are minimised. The physicality of US stadiums are very different to soccer stadiums in other parts of the world, and mic placements for capturing surround in NFL football stadiums had to be approached in an entirely different way.

Microphone customisation was very important, to adapt our approach to the NFL stadium architecture, says Brie. Many of them don't have any kind of roof and that makes things more challenging when it comes to capturing the surround ambience. Often the only place where you can put a surround microphone is right up at the top and at the back of the stadium, which means you can capture some great audio from the front, but it's very uninteresting from the rears.

For the FIFA Club World Cup we've been working with Schoeps to develop new microphone placements that work better in those spaces.

The existing design for the 3D microphone was already a collaboration between Schoeps and HBS and has been used to great effect on a number of FIFA events. The microphone has eight capsules with four capsules angled downwards to capture the front left, front right, rear left and rear right, and an equivalent pointing upwards to get the height.

In US stadiums, that design of microphone isn't always ideal because the capsules are capturing sound all around it, says Brie. So, again in collaboration with Schoeps, we've been trying out some different microphone arrays where the front left and front right capsules are still ostensibly pointing forwards, and we've been making adjustments and carrying out test recordings to set i

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