When it comes to drama and movies for those of us in the UK, Sky’s dominance over the market has been reined in recent years with the likes of Netflix, Prime Video and Disney Plus all taking bites out of its televisual pie. But, when it comes to sport, and, in particular, football, it’s still a Tyrannosaurus Rex, surveying its kingdom, totally dominant over the market.
So, when the invitation came up for me to get the chances to have a behind the scenes look at Monday Night Football, Sky Sports’ flagship Premier League offering, where one-time Liverpool and Manchester United greats Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville analyze and eviscerate the action of the previous weekend and talk you through a new Premier League extravaganza, I jumped at the chance to go along.
Now, for most of you reading this, I know football is gridiron and what we’re talking about is soccer, but as we spent a day behind the scenes at a show quite literally called Monday Night Football, we’ll call it football for the duration of this article.
Taking a trip down to Sky’s mammoth campus in Isleworth in West London, I was squired around the show’s production, including a brief chat with Neville, Carragher and presenter David Jones. As a lifelong football obsessive, that was exciting enough, but I was then treated to watching the whole thing go on air and play out during Newcastle United’s 2-0 win over Arsenal.
Now I’ve calmed down a bit, I thought I’d compile my thoughts and share six things that I learned from this peak behind the curtain.
The team starts early. Very early…
Given Monday Night Football doesn’t go on air until 7pm, you might expect a more leisurely start for the production team. But no such luck – most are in at 9am like the rest of us, getting the technical side of things lined-up. Neville, Carragher and Jones arrive for a meeting at midday and it is then the work on the running order starts. As the production team joke throughout our visit, it’s a running order that gets ripped up a good four or five times during the day.
Sky Sports get the team news before you do…
15 minutes before to be precise. It doesn’t leave much time for Monday Night Football’s team to scramble to find clips if an unexpected player comes back into the team. As we watch things go live, even as the Arctic Monkeys’ Brianstorm thunders through the opening titles, the producers are still running through the early clips in Jamie Carragher’s ear and changing things around. And you thought facing Premier League strikers was tricky.
Everything is smaller than you think…
The studio where Neville, Carragher and Jones face off isn’t the gargantuan, carpark-esque space you might imagine it would be. Things are kept tight and no bigger than your living room at home. They’re moving to a bigger space for next season – we’ll have to hope that the fizzing debate and intense atmosphere that the two pundits are so great at creating doesn’t fizzle out when they move studios.
Every Premier League game needs a lot of cameras…
Monday’s (May 16) game, while important in the race to see who will finish in the Champions League places, but not an absolute humdinger, required the use of 14 cameramen and camerawomen. When Manchester City and Liverpool played out a 2-2 draw earlier in the season, Sky enlisted 22 cameras to make sure absolutely everything was captured. Sky has plans to expand this and for the biggest games next season you’ll see that number creeping up towards 30.
Watching in Sky Glass is a step up for sports fans…
Enhanced modes for sports viewing in the past have been haphazard affairs, largely consisting of turning the pitch a lurid, Matcha-tea green or just turning the volume up a few notches, but when you watch a game in Sky Glass, you can feel the step up.
The experience of watching Arsenal blow their chance of Champions League football on Sky Glass on a 4K UHD Quantum Dot screen with 8.3 million pixels wasn’t quite like the pitchside experience, as the promotional material promise, but the sound is crisp and the picture is so sharp you can see every bead of sweat on the players’ brows.
Being relegated not only means your team will get worse, so does your viewing experience…
If you fall out of the Premier League, as my beloved Norwich City are about to, then not only do you lose the vast riches of English football’s elite, you will also get a poorer viewing experience when you watch at home. Sky broadcasts the Premier League in UHD HDR with Dolby Atmos, and, while they endeavour to do the same for the English Football League, it’s not the case for every game. It’s hard to imagine any coach in the Championship using that in one of his team talks, but it does make the sting of relegation that little bit sharper for us fans.
