With Decision Day on Deck, MLS Productions' Stamford Hub Prepares for 15 Matches in Five Hours

All 30 clubs take the field Saturday, and every camera, graphic, and feed runs through a former UBS trading floor in Connecticut

On Saturday, all 30 Major League Soccer clubs will be in action for Decision Day 2026. Over roughly five hours, clubs will compete for qualification and positioning in the Audi 2026 MLS Cup Playoffs in what is widely considered the most exciting day of the season. The slate stretches from coast to coast and into Canada, but almost everything viewers see will pass through a single building in Stamford, CT.

That building is the home of MLS Productions. The league's in-house production entity operates out of WWE Studios, a former UBS trading floor rebuilt into a broadcast facility that opened in 2023. On match nights, Stamford is the axis on which MLS Productions' live operation turns. From there, content goes out to the masses via Apple TV, FOX, and MLS's international partners.

On a match night, every live match, every studio show, every single piece of content flows through this facility, says Seth Bacon, EVP, media, MLS. It's the nerve center for everything we do.

The Mentality: Built To Take Risks

MLS Productions has worked with production partners IMG and NEP Group to create an ultra-efficient operation. It combines REMI production, centralized graphics and virtual advertising, and automated control rooms, both in Stamford and at IMG's Stockley Park facility in London.

MLS's Seth Bacon: It's the nerve center for everything we do. (Photo: Lucas Boland) People are certainly doing pieces of what we do, says Bacon, but the amount we're putting together all at once is what makes it different. We think about things very differently than a lot of [other sports-media entities] in that we are willing to take risks when it comes to technology.

Many broadcasters test new technology on a secondary feed or a lower-profile production first. MLS Productions has taken a thoughtful approach successfully integrating new technologies - notably, SimplyLive for live production and replay, Reaper for match audio, and Ditto for multilingual graphics - into its primary production workflows.

We're not a group that says no or looks for reasons why we can't do something, Bacon adds. If [a technology] has potential to make things more efficient, we want to find a way to make it work for us. If we hit a blocker, we find a way around it. We've pushed everyone to get comfortable and uncomfortable in all the right places by trying a whole bunch of combinations of hardware and software, and that has paid off for us in the long run.

From Harlem to Stamford: Built From Scratch in Six Months

MLS Productions took shape when the league signed its 10-year media-rights deal with Apple in 2022. Following a renegotiation, the deal will now end after the 2028-29 season.

Previously, clubs produced their own local games, and national partners produced theirs. The league had plenty of production experience, including the MLS Is Back Tournament in Orlando in 2020 and international and world feeds produced with IMG.

But the Apple deal dramatically changed the scale. When we signed with Apple, Bacon explains, part of centralizing the entire media-rights package was that we would deliver everything produced: hundreds of games, plus studio shows, highlights, and original content. And we had about six months to build all that from scratch and be on the air by February 2023.

The league's first calls were to IMG and NEP. For studio operations, MLS moved into NEP's Metropolis facility in Harlem. The historic space at 106th Street and Park Avenue gave MLS a large footprint to launch its live studio programming and also served as a hub for backend operations.

After two years in Harlem, MLS, IMG, and NEP worked together to identify the next step in MLS Productions' evolution. The result was a dedicated facility in Stamford inside WWE Studios. WWE and IMG are both part of TKO Group.

We told WWE that our busiest days were Saturdays and Sundays, recounts Bacon. As luck would have it, those are their dark days, so the schedule fit nicely.

Everything that MLS Productions puts on-air goes through the year-old broadcast facility at WWE Studios in Stamford, CT. Although the studio space was the main draw, the infrastructure behind it turned out to be the real game-changer for MLS Productions. This is one of the most hardened, technologically advanced production studio facilities in the country, he says. It was built as a UBS trading floor, so the redundant power and connectivity were already here, and WWE did an amazing job retrofitting it into a state-of-the-art production studio.

Once the team saw how thoroughly the facility was wired and equipped, Bacon and company began to think beyond the studio. That meant centralizing all match graphics and keeping core production gear in the Stamford equipment room. Crews at Stockley Park in London could operate that gear remotely, and onsite crews at the venues could interact with it seamlessly.

This is only our second season here in Stamford, he notes, but it's almost indescribable what this facility has unlocked for our overall workflow, quality, and content output. I don't mean to sound hyperbolic, but it has revolutionized the way we think, the scale at which we can produce content, and the limits of what we can envision doing in the future.

The Partners Behind the Plant: IMG, NEP, and AE Live Are Integral

IMG plays a major role in the league's production operations, including an in-house editorial team that oversees studio shows in Stamford.

IMG's Stephen Cook: IMG and MLS are doing something here that no other sports league in the U.S. is doing in live production. IMG and MLS are doing something here that no other sports league in the U.S. is doing in l

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