Model Citizens: Inside Manchester City's Media Production Machine

30/01/2023

Model Citizens: Inside Manchester City's media production machine By Will Strauss

Thursday, January 26, 2023 - 17:14

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To find out just how wide-ranging media production is at the world's biggest football clubs, SVG Europe visited English Premier League champions Manchester City FC to see what they do and how they do it, and to get a better understanding of why audio-visual content is so important to the business side of the beautiful game.

Modern-day professional football clubs are no longer just competitive sporting organisations.

From top-flight to non-league, they are also media production machines, pumping out oodles of multimedia content for multiple platforms, and for multiple audiences, all in the name of entertainment, PR, marketing and, perhaps most importantly of all, fan engagement. Football is big business. And media content plays a huge part in it.

It's all a far cry from how things used to be. Readers of a certain vintage will recall that back in the day, as a fan, the closest you could get to your club was articles in the matchday programme or looped news and interviews on ClubCall, a premium rate phone line service.

Premier League champions Manchester City are a great example of how things have changed.

We've got this amazing audience here, says James Wilkins (pictured, right), executive creative director at Manchester City, chatting to SVG Europe on the day of the home team's Premier League clash with Tottenham Hotspur.

We have these passionate fans all around the world. [With our content we ask] what are we going to do to entertain them and bring them closer to the club and the players, and closer to what the Manchester City brand stands for? Everything we do is in service of the fans.

The content designed to fulfil that brief is created by City Studios, an in-house B2B department launched in 2022 that consists of creatives, production talent (including writers, photographers, designers, producers and editors), and facilities.

Between them, they are responsible for live production, behind the scenes', documentaries, and social content, as well as activations' for commercial partners and sponsors.

The output is made available on various platforms including the City+ subscription OTT platform, social media networks and YouTube. Some is shared with broadcasters too.

There is a lot of top-secret stuff that is highly sensitive. The football department needs to know that they can trust us to capture the content in the right way and [keep it that way].

From a live production perspective, while City Studios cannot show the club's Premier League games, those are sold as part of a multi-billion pound league-wide broadcast rights deal, of course, there are various other matches and activities that they do cover including Under 21 and Academy matches, pre- and mid-season friendlies, and press conferences. They also produce live City-centric wrap-around programming for all City's first-team matches.

The latter is called Matchday Live, a show that goes out on City+ pre-match, at half-time, and post-match.

A crucial cog in the club's output, Matchday Live is produced from two studios: Studio 2, which is inside the Etihad Stadium and affords space for a presenter and various ex-player pundits to provide analysis for home matches. And Studio 1 (pictured, top), a new state-of-the-art multi-use 98m2 studio inside the City Campus, adjacent to the club's training pitches. This is used for Matchday Live when City play away. The actual match coverage in both scenarios is limited to audio commentary only.

Studios 1 details

Studio design by Jago Design

Set build and install by Scena

Broadcast support by LDM.tv

Cameras: 4K Blackmagic cameras, with use of a Pedestal, slider and jib

Size: 98m2

Lighting rig with LED cold lighting

Video wall

Green screen area

Additional: Soundproofing, TV floor, gallery, drive-in doors, adjacent live gallery

Where City Studios really goes to town is on those games where they do have the chance to show full match coverage.

Gavin Johnson (pictured below, left), group media director at City Football Group, cites the example of a mid-season friendly versus Gerona that took place at the 7,000 seater Manchester City Academy Stadium (across the road from the club's 53,400-capacity Etihad Stadium) in December 2022 as being indicative of the kind of treatment City Studios can give to matches.

Our production quality is very high, he says. We are set up to do a live seven-camera shoot. We will do pitchside pre-game, presentation, an interview with [manager Pep Guardiola]. We've come a long way. But I have ambitions for us to get even better.

To that end, the City Studios team has doubled in size over the last two years. From approximately 45 staff up to around 90, including admin and content distribution too.

A tour to the US last year was similarly significant for the content team, as Wilkins explains.

Our social team took care of our real-time social content. Our documentary-style films were being made at the same time. We had our live team out there too. Plus local crews that we were managing. In total, there were 150 non-football-related people on that trip. It's about closing that gap between players and fans.

In Houston, adds Johnson, we agreed with the local producer that [a camera operator] could go onto the pitch after a goal was scored to join in with the celebrations. We try to push the boundaries in that way too.

Even the way we cover training, he continues. We've got five Go Pros set up. We get closer to the players. And then we do this amazing edit which then brings fans closer to it.

Loyalty card

At this point, Johnson is quick to reiterate the importance of trust and the close relationship that the media team has with the club

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