This Sunday, Major League Soccer’s MLS Cup will, for the first time, be seen in primetime — and will be covered by 19 cameras. Shifting from daytime on ABC to primetime on ESPN certainly means less football competition for the MLS Championship game, but the Hollywood storylines and upgraded equipment arsenal should be enough to bring more fans to the broadcast than ever before.
Partners in Primetime
“For the first time in history, we’re going into primetime, and we made the switch from ABC to ESPN to get that primetime,” explains Michael Cohen, executive producer for Major League Soccer and Soccer United Marketing. “We are up against primetime lineups, and NBC’s Sunday Night Football game, but we’re not up against an entire slate of NFL games.”
Since 2007, MLS has turned the production of the MLS Cup over to broadcast partner ESPN, but Cohen works closely with the ESPN production staff to plan the coverage. This year will once again bring a studio on-site, with Rob Stone hosting segments before and after the match and at halftime, alongside Julie Foudy and Alexi Lalas. But ESPN is adding to its equipment store this year. A Skycam is one of the 19 cameras that will be used to cover this year’s match, along with Steadicam and two super-slow-motion cameras — a significant upgrade from the nine cameras used for regular-season games.
“Having 19 cameras makes life easier, in that pretty much anything that’s going to happen we’ll have covered,” says Matt Sandulli, senior coordinating producer, event production, at ESPN. “But it makes life tougher because, in soccer, there are very few stoppages of play and, when it comes time for replays, the producer has so many more choices. From a live perspective, there’s nothing you’re going to miss, and, from a tape perspective, there’s nothing you’re going to miss; it just makes us make our choices that much faster.”
ESPN Axis, a virtual-replay technology that highlights the locations and movements of players on the field, will also be used for MLS Cup coverage, as will the virtual offside line. Graphic heat maps will be used to track star-player movement during the match, measuring speed and total distance run by players on the field.
European Flair
The stars are certainly out for Sunday’s game, which will pit David Beckham and Landon Donovan of the Los Angeles Galaxy against Salt Lake FC. MLS’s communications staff works closely with ESPN’s production team to develop storylines and editorial, and the buzz produced by Grant Wahl’s The Beckham Experiment should bring some casual viewers to the broadcast. However, ESPN’s soccer coverage is now more European by design and should appeal to the soccer-savvy fan as well.
“Grant Best, our director, who has come over from England, has stressed some fundamentals that he used over there, and our group has adjusted,” Sandulli says. “It’s made for more of a traditional European soccer-coverage feel. It’s subtle things: taking replays back further to see the play develop, some of the patterns that Grant uses to cut his cameras. It looks and feels more like European coverage.”
Xbox Pitch at Qwest Field in Seattle may look more like a European stadium as well. Seattle has sold out every game this year, averaging more than 30,000 fans per game, and MLS added 6,000 additional seats for this game.
“All year, the atmosphere in Seattle has been amazing. They say you feel like you’re sitting in Europe,” Cohen says. “The fans are not there for a gimmick; they’re there because they are soccer fans.”
Adds Sandulli, “Seattle has been a huge success story for the league, and that relates to us in the television world. When the stadium is crowded and people are going crazy, there’s a tremendous atmosphere, and that absolutely comes through on the television screen. I’m looking forward to it. I think the atmosphere is going to be spectacular.”
Talking Television
MLS and ESPN worked with Qwest Field to ensure that the camera positions for Sunday’s game match the needs of a soccer telecast, not a football game.
“For a game that flows, like soccer, camera positions are different than [for] a game like football, with set plays,” Cohen explains. “We involve our network partners on every step, especially on the new stadiums that we’re building. We don’t just build stadiums and then figure out television; they’re really in there from the start.”
Cohen says other leagues have been in positions where new stadiums go up with fantastic seats and great luxury boxes but television is an afterthought. MLS, he says, thinks differently: “We make sure our partners know that television is a primary concern in everything we do.”
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