UEFA Euro 2020: NEP Central and Southern Europe on logistics, tight timeframes and the shifting sands of bringing four venues to life By Heather McLean, Editor Monday, May 24, 2021 - 17:13
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Managing the logistics behind any of the UEFA Euro venues in a normal year is no easy task, yet with experience, it does become simpler. For NEP Central and Southern Europe, however, working on the postponed 2020 Euros in 2021 has been rather more challenging than usual.
With a tight timeframe and almost constantly changing crewing and logistics plans thanks to the pandemic, the team at the centre of this major football event have had to work hard and be flexible.
NEP Central and Southern Europe has worked with UEFA over many years, since 2009 at the Swedish Under 21 Championship, on through various championships, World Cups and finals. It won the tender to support UEFA Euro 2020 and host broadcaster HBS with four venues - Copenhagen, Munich, Amsterdam and Seville, originally Bilbao - as well as supplying creative and technical crew for each venue.
There were three other packages up for grabs in 2018 from UEFA for the Euros. Another four venue package, which was won by EMG, for Bucharest, Budapest, Baku and Glasgow, plus two smaller packages with London and Rome won by Telegenic, and another for St Petersburg and Dublin won by TVN.
Plans changing daily
Plans for this Euro are changing daily, with complications coming each day. Speaking to SVG Europe, Christer P lsson, president of NEP Central and Southern Europe, and heading up the project, explains how things have evolved in the few months between last summer and today: The plan was to have four guarantee technical teams fixed at the venues then two tech travel teams, one for Amsterdam and Munich, and one for Copenhagen and Seville.
Now there is no one travelling between venues at all due to COVID. Honestly that's the biggest problem we have on the whole thing now. It was two months ago that UEFA told us to cancel the team travel between Munich and Amsterdam and then less than a month ago they told us at the same time they change place from Bilbao to Seville that the travel team between Copenhagen and Seville should not travel either. So the last two months we've had to find 50 or 60 extra people.
I'm not worried about people quality; all of the teams are very experienced. I'm worried about people of course, because there will be a lot of people on the same spot for a very long time. There is a lot of COVID restrictions, and a lot of bubbles, but we are not the only ones.
P lsson goes on: Each tech travel team had 23 people onboard: one team leader, one vision engineer, one vision supervisor, 11 vision controllers, one HDR supervisor, one communication engineer, two sound assistants, two tech assistants, two riggers and one video engineer. Instead of two teams of 23 we now have four teams, so with short notice we had to find, for example, 22 vision controllers.
He continues: We have 51 technical crew on each venue (totalling 204), then we also are responsible for one production team for Munich, with 52 people including a director, camera operators and EVS ops. We then have one Hive/Mediabank guarantee at the IBC in Amsterdam [Mediabank is the backbone of UEFA's MAM system].
Alexander Garcia, core team member for the Euros and NEP Belgium project manager, comments: On the level of crew bookings I think this is one of the most difficult ones we've ever done. I know it's only caused by COVID, but it's been very last minute and you are more or less bound on trying to book as many local people as possible, so there are many extra factors that you have to keep in mind to manage the bookings and the logistics, etc.
Life made interesting
P lsson continues: We had a very scary moment, because until now UK people have not been able to travel to Spain, and we have a venue in Spain that we need to get a UK truck to. We needed nine UK people to travel to Seville. It's ok now. We just received a letter from the Spanish Ministry of Culture. Yet now we have got some new challenges as some countries made a travel ban for UK citizens life is interesting. But there's been a lot of this; we've needed so many invitation letters from almost every country, all the football federation and testing documents; it's been the worst ever [Euros in terms of] the paperwork workload.
Garcia says that due to the need to use local people and the sudden changes to the Euros schedule, the crew being added to the four teams most recently is highly experienced, but possibly not with as many major events under their belts as the initial all-star crew that NEP put together, which was set to travel between each venue. To ensure the quality of all four teams now, NEP has split the first team between each of the four venues to make sure that standards are maintained.
P lsson adds: I'm not worried about people quality; all of the teams are very experienced. I'm worried about people of course, because there will be a lot of people on the same spot for a very long time. There is a lot of COVID restrictions, and a lot of bubbles, but we are not the only ones [undergoing this process] and we will do the best we can do.
Keep on trucking
NEP Central and Southern Europe has bought together 12 trucks from within the Group to fulfil UEFA's requirements. These are: four from NEP UK for the host trucks Caspian, Pacific, Aurora and Sargasso - plus three from NEP Germany, two from NEP Sweden, one from NEP Switzerland and two from NEP Belgium.
Normally for these events NEP Central and Southern Europe works independently with its team from Belgium and Germany. However, this year the UK has been bought into the group. P lsson explains why: The reason we've included our lovely friends from
