How IMG spreads Premier League’s global brand – from a trading estate near Heathrow

  


The Premier League’s commercial TV juggernaut heavily relies on the strongly branded and relentless content generated by the London-based media company, and there’s no sign of audience appetite waning 
• Premier League promises to share £1bn of TV deal

The secret to the English top flight’s mind-blowing commercial success overseas is not to be found in the Premier League Live events that aim to spread its high-octane gospel to new lands, most recently Mumbai.

Nor in Lagos or Lilongwe, where unofficial replica shirts and liveried taxis bear witness to its strength throughout Africa. Nor in Sydney or Melbourne, wherehuge crowds last summer greeted Liverpool and Manchester United.

Nor in New York or New England, where NBC’s wall-to-wall presentation has taken the Premier League’s Stateside popularity to new heights, making it the sport of choice among college hipsters.

Nor even in the Asian strongholds of Thailand and Singapore, where passion for English top-flight teams has grown over the past two decades to extraordinary levels among those who may never see their side in the flesh.

Instead, you need to search closer to home. At a nondescript trading estate in the no man’s land north of Heathrow to be precise, where a purpose-built studio complex acts a mothership for the global reach of the Premier League brand.

Spanning three storeys, with floor-to-ceiling Premier League banners bisecting the stairwells, the studios are home to the matches and supporting content beamed around the world by the production arm of the global sports giant IMG, formerly known as TWI.

The company, whose heritage is proudly displayed in the reception of the new building with an advert for Trans World Sport (that 1980s cult classic that featured everything from kabbadi to kite boarding), has been the Premier League’s overseas production partner since 1998.

Showing off the cavernous facility Graham Fry, the managing director of global production for IMG Media, says: “To start with we covered non-live matches on three cameras; three years later on just four cameras.”

By 2007, when the Premier League’s income from overseas rights had spiralled from an estimated £8m a year in 1992 to £208m per year, Fry says the game had completely changed.

At the conference held for all overseas broadcasters of the Premier League at the end of each season, they began to demand a 24/7 channel.

Instead, IMG went down the route of producing hours of bespoke content – from a daily news show to a bewildering array of other feeds that contribute to building the Premier League brand and keep overseas viewers sated.

Nick Moody, the head of Premier League Productions, rattles off a list to illustrate the extent to which the world is served up a highly produced, perfectly pitched Premier League product.

“We produce a half- and full-time world feed programme,” he says. “There are a number of additional properties we’ve added over the years: a super feed, a multi-angle replay service, a clips channel, dedicated wide angle, a tactical feed, dedicated interview lines, all these additional things we’re adding as the broadcasters make more demands on us.

“We started with one magazine show, we now do seven a week. On average, that’s 5,000 hours of content we distribute a week.”

Figures compiled by the football finance blogger Swiss Ramble demonstrate how overseas rights fees have soared over the past two decades. But the most vertiginous rise has come over the past three deals.

The take has grown from £479m a year for the contract covering 2010 to 2013, rising to £744m a year under the current deal and – according to even the more modest predictions for the likely growth under the contracts now being negotiated – to a likely £968m for the three seasons from 2016-17.

That would take the total income from overseas rights to £2.9bn and the overall total from £5.4bn to £8.2bn over three seasons.

Just as the strategic importance of live Premier League content to first pay-TV broadcasters and now quadruple-play communications companies has fuelled the rise in domestic income, so the same phenomenon has played out in different ways across the globe.

As Moody outlines the thousands of hours of content that pour out of the studios every week, with the 360 live matches at their heart, it brings to mind those other multinational brands that have exacting standards to ensure the burgers look and taste the same at every franchise from Bangalore to Boston.

“Every game looks identical,” says Fry. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s QPR against Leicester or Manchester United against Liverpool, it will be treated the same and look the same.

“The excitement of the football is what has grown the Premier League around the world, but we have played an unquantifiable part. You can go on holiday and glance in a bar and know when it is a Premier League match because you see the graphics, you recognise it. The pictures are crisper, the stadiums are always full.”

This consistent branding, with the same music, the same graphics, the same logos, also act as a kind of audio-visual watermark employed as part of the Premier League’s ongoing battle against piracy – both in pubs beaming in signals from abroad and among those sitting at home watching illegally online.

Moody shows off a clip of a documentary that illustrates the history of the most popular football league in the world that is at once stirring and enough to bring those who believe it has done as much harm as good out in a rash.

“15th August 1992. A day that will forever resonate throughout the history of English football,” intones the voiceover. “It was the day the game entered a new era. An era of previously unimaginable athletes. It was the start of a completely different ball game.”

There are archive shows, documentaries and profiles of “Premier League legends” – all helping build and reinforce the mythology.

The pick-and-mix service allows the broadcasters across 212 territories that beam into 650m homes to take as much or as little of the ancillary content around the games as they like.

So major broadcasters such as NBC in the US might only relay the live feeds that are taken from the Sky, BT Sport and BBC coverage before adding their own commentary, studio programmes and analysis. There is even a special camera in the gantry so that broadcasters can get shots of their own commentators if they have them, thus proving they are on site.

But other, smaller rights holders might take the whole shebang – right down to the classic moments, clips and factoids that fill the four-minute gaps left for commercial breaks.

“We all underestimate how knowledgeable fans are overseas,” says Fry. “We have a show called Fanzone and you’ll have a guy in Kenya arguing with a guy in Singapore over why the Arsenal back four is not functioning as unit.”

This breadth and depth explains in part why the Premier League chief executive, Richard Scudamore, has spoken in the past of overseas fans being just as important as homegrown fans who have passed the torch down generations.

It also explains why the Football Association chairman, Greg Dyke, claimed that spiralling income from rights fees would disconnect the Premier League further from its moorings and end up “being owned by foreigners, managed by foreigners and played by foreigners”.

Scudamore was blunt last week when asked what his measures of success were in light of English clubs underperforming in the Champions League.

“Attendance No1. Global audience No2. That’s it. How many people are turning up and how many people are watching,” he said. “People like what we do. We’ve never put false measures in that we must win X number of Champions Leagues. Our matches, our top clubs, the viewing is going up and up around the world, irrespective of European success or otherwise.”

The centralised production base and strong branding developed by Premier League Productions also has the effect of blunting the expansionist ambitions of the clubs themselves.

As overseas revenues, equally shared between the 20 clubs in an effort to maintain the competitive balance of the league, have soared there have been periodic rumblings among the biggest who feel they would earn far more selling their own rights. The last concerted push came from Liverpool in 2011 but was shot down in flames.

In truth, as long as Scudamore and his close cabal of advisers continue to grow the overall cake there is enough recognition that the collective competitiveness of the League is vital to its appeal to stymie any effort to lobby for the two-thirds majority that would be required to change the arrangements.

Instead, the biggest clubs have focused on growing their commercial revenues overseas to take advantage of the growing interest and eyeballs. Manchester United have led the way, hugely increasing their international revenues by slicing and dicing their sponsorship packing into regional packages.

Meanwhile, the chief executive, Ed Woodward, has long been an advocate of seeking new high-speed broadband and telecoms partnerships around the world that can push Manchester United content into the hands and homes of their “followers” around the globe.

A chasing pack – led by Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea – has followed suit, with the latter’s £200m deal with Yokohama Rubber the latest example of their increased reliance on overseas brands.

Clubs are happier than ever to help IMG facilitate the demands of Premier League Productions because they recognise the value it brings.

In one room at Stockley Park sits a host of young bloggers and social media journalists, churning out content not only for the Premier League’s website but for Chinese social networks.

China is one of the few territories not up for grabs under the current round of negotiations, due to be concluded by the end of the year, with the decision having been taken to hand a longer-term deal to Super Sport, reaching 21 free-to-air stations across the vast country in an attempt to hook its 1.3bn population.

On the night we visit, there are nine helter-skelter midweek matches in progress and in the Star Trek style main production hub there is a hubbub of activity as staff deal with the technical demands from broadcasters around the world.

“It looks quite frightening. And it is. But these guys know what they’re doing,” laughs Fry, pointing out a corner of the studio devoted to beaming the live signals out to aeroplanes and cruise ships.

In dedicated suites, a separate team work on each match – editing the coverage, providing highlights and preparing highlights packages on the fly.

Cameras home in on the fans in the stands who provide the colourful backdrop to the action and, according to the supporter groups who protested last week outside the Premier League shareholders meeting, deserve to share in the likely £8bn-plus bounty of the next broadcast deal.

It is striking the extent to which the atmosphere, passion and noise are pushed to the forefront as part of the spine-tingling package that plays so well around the world. As such, it cannot help but give added weight to those demands – particularly over away ticket prices.

Downstairs, Andy Townsend and Danny Murphy are the pundits on duty to provide analysis in the studio for the global feed. They are the voices that take the Premier League gospel to the world.

“Whenever I’m travelling around the world, someone always stops you and says: ‘I saw you here, there or wherever,’” says Townsend, whose ITV contract comes to an end at the conclusion of the season but here broadcasts to more than 650m homes.

Murphy, his eyes fixed on the unfolding drama before him as the action flits around the grounds, adds: “I went on safari last year and ended up in the staff quarters, which was basically a corrugated iron shed, and watching this lot presenting Palace play Liverpool.”

A floor above their heads, a tangle of tens of thousands of wires and servers hum, buzz and flash with the latest from White Hart Lane, Upton Park and the rest of English football’s grand old grounds, relaying the latest unscripted episodes in this extremely lucrative sporting soap opera to a waiting global audience.