The most popular soccer league in the world is set to return to television this month. On June 17, NBSCN will air a triple header of English Premier League action. In order to get the word out about what the restart of the league will look like, the network held a conference call with reporters on Thursday.
Pierre Moossa, the coordinating producer of Premier League matches on NBCSN, stressed that he hopes fans will not notice much difference on their screens. The network will still have broadcast teams on site. Behind the scenes though, things will be run very differently.
“Our mentality and approach is to treat it like an Olympic or World Cup tournament. It’s 35 shows in 40 days,” Moosa said. “We will cover the matches, the storylines, the reviews and previews and we’re going to approach it very differently from that standpoint.”
Studio host Rebecca Lowe added that the focus on storytelling is important. The way a season unfolds in the Premier League, there are plenty of storylines fans get invested in beyond just a championship.
“I don’t want to ever forget as we begin that we are storytellers and our story stopped rather abruptly like so many did three months ago and we are here to tell, not just Liverpool story, which of course is a headline story, the 30‑year‑wait, plus a few months, she said. “But all the stories of relegation and the stories of all the other teams within the Premier League, whether it be a Sheffield United story and how fantastic they have done this season only to be stopped and how will they end.”
Although initially he wanted to give viewers a realistic sense of what it is like to be in a British soccer stadium right now, Moosa says he and producers from Sky Networks in the UK are in agreement that crowd noise is essential for watching soccer on television. NBCSN will utilize sounds recorded for EA Sports’s FIFA video game series during the broadcast.
EA has sampled 92 different crowds to obtain those sounds. Moosa says it will be possible to draw authentic sounds from specific matchups to give viewers at home an accurate version of what the game’s atmosphere would be like under normal conditions.
