One day evolutionary biologists will tire of fossils and turn their attention to the important stuff: football broadcasting. A moment from 2013 will stand out as the great leap, Jamie Carragher jumping to his feet and emerging from behind the Monday Night Football desk.
Carragher was making his MNF debut and enthusiastically demonstrating the difficulty of marking Robin van Persie. This redrew what was possible for football punditry, beginning a new era of more energetic analysis. For too long pundits had been hidden behind their desks, for all we knew pairing their jackets and ties with swimming trunks.
That move towards physicality has informed Sky Sports’ revamped studio for Monday Night Football which will be used for the first time for Manchester United vs Wolves. Anyone who has visited a TV studio will tell you the same thing, they are remarkably small. On my visit the MNF set felt spacious, so will probably seem enormous on screen. The camera adds 10 giant iPads.
Presenter David Jones, Carragher, Gary Neville and Karen Carney will be surrounded on all sides by LED screens. Some visual-effects wizardry will add a stadium-like roof at the top of the frame and the promise is more colour, improved insight and enveloping the viewer within the production.
This was the programme on which Ron Atkinson lost his rag with Messrs Keys and Gray, saying “You can play with your silly machines all you like”. The machines may have lost that battle but have conclusively won the war. The central area is now occupied by a vast screen nested within the floor. This can be used to display formations and lets pundits move players as well as placing themselves physically within the shapes and events they are discussing.
‘We were driven by what Carragher and Neville wanted’
Five days before the first show, production staff are armed with tape measures, checking distances around the tactics dancefloor. I tread on it gingerly, because it still seems like dangerous magic to walk on a screen. I should not worry, says Sky’s director of creative output Ben Wickham, it is built to handle anything from high heels to a car. “We’re not going to do any dancing this week,” he says. “But it has a fun vibe to it, and it’s meant to feel like that.”
Over on the familiar giant touchscreen Virtual View is the new killer app, allowing replays which can be seen from any player’s point of view. Wickham tees up Newcastle conceding to Martin Odergaard from Nick Pope’s angle, and the picture alters in line with Pope’s head movements. The goalkeeper was unsighted at the crucial moment, and now that can be said with certainty rather than via educated guesswork.
From there there is only logical question: Why? At what point do tech advances no longer improve the viewer’s enjoyment? Wickham makes a convincing argument that Sky’s new tech, its flexibility and scale, will enliven the avalanche of data generated by every Premier League game. There has been involvement throughout for Carney, Carragher, and Neville. “They are baked into that studio, we wanted to be driven by what they wanted.”
Gary Hughes, Sky’s director of football, feels any shackles have now been removed. “We’ve got the best pundits in the game and want to give them an opportunity in probably the best studio in the country, and potentially in Europe.
“It gives them the opportunity to showcase their talents as pundits and to better themselves, like they would want to improve as players. They’ve been sitting there with touchscreens, stuck behind a desk for the last 10 years. Now they’ve got the ability to move and to be more dynamic and create more fun and entertainment.”
Fundamentally it will still look like Monday Night Football. The branding persists, a colour palette of moody blues, as will the themetune, Fluke’s ‘Absurd’, unchanged since 1997. Hughes seems mildly aghast when I suggest some viewers will probably not even clock the studio changes. “I’d be amazed if people didn’t tune in on Monday and notice it was a new set, because of the size it, the scope of it and the new elements to it.”
‘TNT Sports? I’m not worried about it’
One big change from Carragher’s debut 10 years ago is in the clothes. It was striking on the final day of last season, traditionally a Sunday best affair, there was not a tie among Sky’s panel at Goodison Park. “Comfortably smart” is the phrase Wickham hits upon, although there is no formal directive given to pundits on what to wear. “These people are on screen because we want them to be themselves. I think the way they dress is an important part of who they are as a person. So within certain rules we want them to show up as themselves.”
We meet days before the first Premier League game on TNT Sport, the successor to BT. Will Hughes and Wickham be watching with interest? “I’ll be in the Soccer Saturday studio,” says Hughes. “That will certainly be my priority on Saturday morning.”
“We love competition,” says Wickham. “We’ve got the best rights, the best studios, the best pundits and the best talent. I’ll be watching them, I’d be interested to see what they’re doing. But I’m absolutely not worried about it in any way, shape or form.”
You can bet Sky’s rivals will all be watching on Monday night.
