EA SPORTS Scales Madden Bowl Into Multi-Site, Multi-Stream Production for Super Bowl LX Week

The production of the mega-esports event also leverages facilities at EA headquarters in Redwood City

When EA SPORTS' Madden Bowltakes over San Francisco's Chase Center tonight, the show will bear all the hallmarks of an exciting, in-person activation from the events team at Electronic Arts. Behind the scenes, the 2026 edition of Madden Bowl will be a multi-site, multi-stream production operation spanning the arena floor at Chase Center, EA's Redwood Shores headquarters, and a week-long slate of esports broadcasts and social-first content.

It's an all-encompassing evening of content and incredible music entertainment, says John Reseburg, VP, brand and communications, EA SPORTS. This is our biggest Madden Bowl yet.

Approximately 3,000 fans, athletes, creators, partners, and guests will be inside Chase Center for the event, but the production is designed to extend far beyond the room.

We of course don't want it to be an event just for the 3,000 people that join us, Reseburg explains. We want it to be for all the fans in San Francisco, around the country, and around the world to celebrate sport and fandom and football and this convergence of football and entertainment and music and culture. That's the vision. We work to bring it all to life through a massive production that takes most of the year to put together.

For EA SPORTS, Madden Bowl is no longer just a one-night show but a broadcast-scale expression of how the company brings sports, gaming, and live entertainment together. It's all about belonging, he says, and feeling the value of being part of this global football community.

A Week-Long Effort

For EA SPORTS, Madden Bowl is the centerpiece of a broader Super Bowl LX production endeavor that comprises the Madden Championship Series esports competition, creator-driven gaming activations, content capture at the Super Bowl Media Center, and EA's annual Super Bowl simulation and prediction.

Madden Bowl is the peak of how EA SPORTS gets to show up and be part of Super Bowl Week, says Evan Dexter, VP, franchise strategy and marketing (American Football), EA SPORTS.

The challenge for the production team is not simply executing a single live show; it's synchronizing multiple live and near-live outputs for different platforms and audiences. Madden Bowl, he says, is one of those places where we get to take the biggest sport platform in North America and put fans and creators and partners and athletes into one place. It ends up being this sports community that our brand is uniquely enabled to bring together.

At the same time, the experience is intentionally designed to work for audiences following remotely. It's something that we're uniquely positioned to do in ways that people get to engage onsite and in their living rooms, Dexter says, and the game kind of reflects what's going on in San Francisco if you can't be there.

Production Trucks at Every Major Site

Instead of centralizing production through a single remote hub, EA SPORTS is operating live productions from multiple physical sites throughout the week. There are production trucks at every major location where we are operating the event, says Reseburg.

At EA's Redwood Shores campus in Redwood City, CA, a full mobile unit supports live and streamed coverage of the Madden Championship Series. Meanwhile, a truck is also handling production at Chase Center.

Although the concert portion of the show will not be streamed, related coverage will be produced live from the venue. Says Reseburg, Content surrounding the event and leading up to it is going to be live and posted and shared all throughout the evening.

That content includes creator streams and live podcasting. Popular content creator and influencer Sketch and the popular online video series I Am Athlete will be broadcasting live from the event's blue carpet, drumming up hype around the pre-event and extending the moment's reach across social and digital platforms.

Anywhere where we are operating an event and there is livestreaming, notes Reseburg, we are running that directly from onsite.

Applying Sports-Broadcast Craft to Esports

For EA's competition broadcasts, the presentation is based on the same grammar familiar to traditional live sports productions. Says Dexter, A lot of the cutting and the curation of the presentation mirrors what you would see in sports broadcasting - through commentators, through replays, through presentation packages that we get to curate as it's emerging.

Although Madden avoids some of the camera-selection complexity seen in other esports genres, the production demands remain significant. It takes a lot of skill from our production teams, he explains, to know when's the right time to pull out and go to color commentary, when's the right time to pull out and go to presentation packages.

The packages are turned around in real time. There are editors working on the fly to curate and get live in the moment, Dexter adds. [It's] a lot of the same challenges that traditional sports broadcasters have to work out.

A Social-First Blue-Carpet Operation

One of the most notable production evolutions for this year's Madden Bowl is expansion of the blue-carpet operation into a primary storytelling and content hub.

We set out this year to continue working on how we can make the story of this evening be something that reaches and translates for an even broader audience, Reseburg explains. We've put a lot into the executions on our blue carpet. We're going to have a host of different ways that stories come to life and are translated for fans in fun, exciting ways through voices that they know and follow.

This year's blue-carpet coverage will be hosted by Kay Adams and Jameis Winston and distributed directly thro

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/02/06/ea-sports-scales-madden-bowl-in...
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