Intense Journey: Bringing the Production of the National League Promotion Final to Viewers with DAZN

Intense journey: Bringing the production of the National League Promotion final to viewers with DAZN By Heather McLean

Tuesday, June 10, 2025 - 10:26

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The plan for the production of the final between Oldham Athletic and Southend United has been a work in motion since DAZN started the the season, its first of seven in the current contract

DAZN holds the UK's National League football exclusive rights and host broadcast contract for seven years, and having just produced the much-anticipated final at Wembley Stadium on 1 June, it has six more years of this relationship to go.

DAZN's Dave Wade, VP production and editorial, comments on the length of the contract and the host broadcaster's goals: DAZN's old enough to have a tradition of trying to do longer term partnerships. Rather than the traditional models of you have the rights, we buy them and then we'll come and talk to you in three years time, we have a very much more collaborative approach.

So the deal actually isn't just rights on DAZN; it is the National League TV channel on DAZN. It very much still retains its identity as the National League and it'll be something that we will work together as we have done in year one more and more closely to gain success, drive viewers and fans into stadiums and onto the platform to just make this as big a success as we can.

Production plan

The plan for the production of the final between Oldham Athletic and Southend United has been a work in motion since DAZN started the season, notes Rhys Griffiths, DAZN's National League lead producer. It's really weird when it's something this big. I think you are almost planning it from when people get the contract; it's bubbling away throughout the whole year. Even if you are not thinking about it, you are almost thinking about it because it's the showpiece event. I suppose when we started planning properly it was the turn of the year; we actually started drumming around ideas on what we were going to do, how we were going to do it, and talking to our OB supplier, Over Exposed. So it is quite a while in the planning, and then it gets much more intensive.

Read more Bouncing around Wembley: DAZN on its editorial thrust for the National League Promotion final at Wembley

The playoffs in the National League are quite long, a bit longer than everyone else's, he adds. The season finished on 5 May. That gives you just under a month, especially from my point of view, to write the running orders, [and for] Saffron [Sutcliffe] our production manager to liaise with the OB company and the League, so it becomes much more ramped up in the last month.

The final was a 14 camera plan plus two ENG crews. Wade comments: The final was all produced on site. Wembley is all completely connected so there's fibre and we just book those lines, and then we connect really simply to our Leeds-based production TX and MCR centre. So all the signal goes from Wembley to Leeds, and then out onto platform.

Audio was the major challenge for the National League Promotion final between Oldham Athletic and Southend United

Complex audio

Audio was the major challenge for the final, says Griffiths. He explains: I think when you're trying to do that 360 thing, it's mostly it's audio [that's the challenge]; you've got to hear everybody. I would say the biggest challenge was audio and comms. So for Martin [Seweryn] on sound, that meant lots and lots of mics. I think we counted that in the end because obviously the managers joined us, the players joined us, the chairman and his wife joined us at the end as well, so it was a one plus six, which was interesting! So from an audio point of view, it was a big challenge. We wanted to move about, so you've got to have RF mics, you've got to have the signal receivers in the right spots, so not only are you picking up what they're saying for the audience at home, we can actually talk to them and direct. It was really testing that true live audio, where everything has to work.

Wade says that the success of the match was down in a large part to DAZN's OB provider for the final, Over Exposed. He says: Over Exposed has been with us every step of the journey this season. It's been a great partnership. With the audio, everyone thinks about, oh, how many cameras have you got? but if people can't hear each other or talk to each other, it just all falls apart. So the crew from Over Exposed did an outstanding job delivering that OB at Wembley and to do a one plus six. It was a one truck OB so everything's a bit more condensed and it relies more on the expertise of the crew, because you don't have the technology to take any of that weight like you would on a much bigger OB.

With DAZN's Multi-Match Live offering, viewers can keep tabs on multiple National League games playing around the year at the same time around the country. Notes Griffiths: It's not like a Soccer Saturday where they're just talking; on an article 48 exempt day, when we have all these games that are on the platform, [Multi-Match Live is] an added offering. You can still watch all the games live, but then you can join us and we'll pick three or four absolute key games and we'll talk all about it. Over Exposed built a purpose audio unit in the studio so that we could have the three guests in the studios, but also they could hear all the Zoom calls that were coming in, so we had a maximum four Zoom calls during one show as well as the guests. They've done a really good job on that.

Intense journey

Griffiths comments on how the final went: I think you always learn loads of stuff. From what I wanted to achieve in terms of showing the audience every part of Wembley we could, and getting all the views, especially in the buildup an

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