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As part of his preparation to produce Friday’s Green Bay Packers–Philadelphia Eagles game in Brazil, longtime NBC Sports producer Matt Marvin traveled to São Paulo last May for a survey of the facilities at Corinthians Arena, home to Sport Club Corinthians Paulista, or Corinthians, which plays in Brazil’s top soccer division.
Marvin has produced a ton of sports during his career — his current assignment is lead producer for NBC’s “Big Ten Saturday Night” package — and he’s keenly aware that Corinthians Arena is not exactly Camp Randall. It’s smaller than an American football stadium — the capacity is a shade under 50,000 — and, of course, built for soccer. The stadium will be one of the venues for the 2027 Women’s World Cup and hosted games in 2014 for the men’s World Cup.
On the trip, Marvin and a dozen technical executives from NBC (and another dozen staffers from the NFL) met with Corinthians Arena officials to figure out the logistics needed to televise an NFL game. The result is NBC will have about 100 people on-site working the game, from camera operators to tape editors to security to translators. One of the things Marvin’s team requested from stadium officials was to create a broadcast booth for announcers Noah Eagle and Todd Blackledge (Kaylee Hartung will be on the sidelines) that was similar to an NFL booth, meaning more enclosed than the traditional soccer setup, where the crowd is very close to the broadcasters.
“It’s a soccer stadium, and we’re doing a football game there,” Marvin said. “The (NHL) Winter Classic is what comes to my mind as an equivalent, and I’ve done a bunch of those in the past. But a soccer stadium is a lot more aligned with football than a baseball stadium is with hockey, so at least the camera positions are more familiar. The traditional soccer positions for cameras are not exactly what football positions are but we can make adjustments and slide stuff around to where it’s going to look like a prime-time football game. There’s not going to be any kind of camera position where the viewer is saying, what the heck is that?”
The Eagles-Packers game is unique for obvious reasons. It is the NFL’s first-ever regular season game in South America, and it will air exclusively on Peacock, the streaming network’s third exclusive NFL game following the Buffalo Bills–Los Angeles Chargers regular-season game in December 2023 and the Miami Dolphins–Kansas City Chiefs AFC wild-card playoff game in January. (Kickoff is 8:15 p.m. ET, and the game will also be available on free, over-the-air broadcast television in the local markets of the competing teams, as well as on mobile devices with NFL+.)
The broadcast will have some novel features for viewers. For instance, it will feature fewer traditional commercial placements. There will be three or four spots in the game where they will stay with the broadcast during what is usually a traditional commercial break.
“One of the things the Peacock game will feature is we’ll do what’s called sort of a studio takeover and not go to a traditional commercial but stay at the field and deliver additional content while not going to a traditional break,” said Rob Hyland, the coordinating producer for NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.” “There’s actually one of those happening in kickoff as well as at the end of the first quarter.”
The international market represents a massive growth opportunity for the NFL. The league says it is committed to Brazil as a site for games and will play a regular-season game in Madrid next season. NFL officials are also scouting markets in Europe, Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. (On this note, we will likely see a future television package sold to a media company revolving around international games.)
The Packers-Eagles game is a litmus test for not only the potential NFL fan base in Brazil — which the NFL cites as 36 million via a Brazilian research institute (IBOPE) survey — but also for the league’s ambitions to get American consumers to pay for the product no matter the platform. (The Athletic’s Brooks Kubena spent eight days in São Paulo reporting on the NFL’s plans to cultivate the Brazil market.)
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“You all know the major focus we have on growing the game globally for the league, the 32 clubs, and expanding our presence in more key markets,” said Peter O’Reilly, an NFL executive vice president in charge of international events. “Brazil’s is a very important market and helping to realize that global growth. There’s 36 million NFL fans in Brazil, which is the third largest NFL fan base behind the U.S. and Mexico.”
Eagle has never traveled to South America, and the broadcaster said he downloaded some videos of the stadium to get a little familiar with the setup.
“It’s mostly a soccer stadium type of field, which I got the chance to do when I did a game in Dublin last year between Notre Dame and Navy,” Eagle said. “That was my first foray regarding the international differences from what we expect of a football stadium in America to what it feels like outside of the States.”
If all goes well, it should look to consumers at home like a typical NFL game, with the added benefit of some Brazilian culture thrown in. This is only Marvin’s third NFL game as a lead producer, including the Cleveland Browns–Houston Texans playoff game last season, but he’s no stranger to an NFL production truck. He previously worked as a replay producer on NFL broadcasts. He is naturally aware of the NFL’s interest in the game as it relates to international growth, but like most people in his position, he’s hyper-focused on what he can control.
“I don’t feel any extra pressure, but any time you can say you’re in the first game anywhere of anything, there is a responsibility to say, ‘OK, what’s unique about this?’” he said. “We want to capture part of the flavor of São Paulo and Brazil, and that will be sprinkled throughout the show. But the word is balance.
“This is also the first game of the season for two teams that have high hopes … with passionate fan bases. The storylines for both of these teams coming out of last season are incredible, and there are stars everywhere on the field. So you have to put yourself in the fans’ shoes.”
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(Photo: Brooke Sutton via AP)
