Live From 2025 FIFA Club World Cup: FIFA, HBS Focus on Tournament Wrap, With an Eye to 2026 Men's World Cup

Live From 2025 FIFA Club World Cup: FIFA, HBS Focus on Tournament Wrap, With an Eye to 2026 Men's World Cup We are triply committed to delivering two great semifinals and a great final on Sunday -Oscar Sancez, FIFA By Ken Kerschbaumer

Tuesday, July 8, 2025 - 12:18 pm

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As the FIFA and HBS teams producing the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup focus on MetLife Stadium with the semifinals today and tomorrow and the final on Sunday, they are thinking, too, of lessons for next year's FIFA Men's World Cup. A key to their effort has been the International Broadcast Coordination Center (IBCC) located at MetLife Stadium.

This is the type of setup we needed, says Oscar Sanchez, head of host broadcast production, FIFA. MetLife Stadium had the space and connectivity, so it has been very easy to be based here. And, when you consider that we have both semifinals and the final here, this approach makes a lot of sense [versus being in something like a convention center].

The IBCC, a temporary facility comprising 135 cabins with a little more than 1,800 sq. meters of indoor space, serves as a technical and production hub. Feeds come in from the 63 matches played at 12 stadiums (two in Orlando), and a team of more than 320 FIFA, HBS, and DAZN staffers ensure that the world feeds and other content are created and are all they should be before being sent to rightsholders. Sanchez credits FIFA'S Neil Darroch for much of the success as Darroch led the project and a team of committed professionals from North America, bringing it to life over the past year.

All feeds produced at the stadiums are sent to the IBCC via a dedicated SMPTE ST 2110 redundant contribution network using JPEG-XS compression. They are prepped in master control for distribution to rightsholders onsite as SDI handoff, via satellite distribution, or streaming for offsite distribution worldwide. Non-live content is produced offsite from a central location in Europe.

The FIFA Club World Cup IBCC is located between MetLife Stadium and the Meadowlands Racetrack in East Rutherford, NJ.

Below are some of the key highlights and takeaways from the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup.

The scale of production will grow this week with a point-to-point camera system, an FPV drone, and a Buggy Cam added to the production arsenal for the three remaining matches at MetLife Stadium.

The point-to-point camera will be a tad higher than Camera 1 and will be able to move from touch line to touch line, says Peer Seitz, project lead, FIFA Club World Cup 2025, HBS. The drone will be on the main camera side, and we hope to get a few really nice shots during the setup phase, flying around the stadium. We will see how we can use the Buggy Cam for things like player walkout and the lineups.

Sunday's final will have a separate production truck and team dedicated to the halftime show.

It's a totally different production crew and everything, although we will share some resources, says Sanchez. It makes sense, given the demands of the game. It's a whole different show that is not only the halftime show but the ceremonies. You need the match team to focus on the game.

Game Creek Video is providing broadcast facilities for match coverage at MetLife Stadium while NEP Denali will handle the halftime and ceremonies for the Final on Sunday.

Quality control is about more than just image and audio quality.

In a control room handling all the feeds from all the matches, producers dedicated to live editorial-quality control provide feedback to each production team and ensure that everything goes off as scheduled. The producers are seated in the QC room during the matches, centralizing their operations and ensuring that they can communicate with the production teams onsite as well as with each other. On the day before a match, the producers check all the feeds and calibrate the mix of editorial, technology, and timing for the next day. The QC producer also works with the world-feed announcers to go over the match coverage and elements.

The QC team is one of the successes of the tournament, says Sanchez, noting, There is a whole HBS team focused on making sure everything is as consistent as possible from one match to the next. Without [this] great QC process, we wouldn't be able to deliver a consistent product. We also need to stick to the running order of elements: being off by one or two seconds can cause issues both commercially and in terms of match coverage.

Match producers oversee quality control for all matches from a centralized location at the IBCC.

Master control is the key room in the compound: the engineering team monitors the contribution and distribution network from there. It is also home to the longest days, especially during the Group Stage.

That is where we create the basic international feed that rightsholders put on-air, says Sanchez. Rightsholders get coverage of the warmups, introductions, the match, and everything else. Having four kickoff times per day was hard, but it was a good experience, and the teams performed really well. It was good practice for next year.

Master control plays the defining role in creating the world feed for the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup.

The 2025 FIFA Club World Cup production is definitely not a test, but it has provided a test of workflows for next year, such as having a dedicated production teams for each city. There were 11 production teams for this event; next year, that will expand to 16.

We've tried to avoid moving them from venue to venue, says Sanchez. We're going to [have dedicated teams] next year [because the number of matches] is going to be demanding on everyone and, if we had five or six teams rotating around the venues, it would get super complicated. We also decrease the risk [of things like travel delays],

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