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As part of his preparations for producing Friday’s Green Bay Packers game against the Philadelphia Eagles in Brazil, longtime NBC Sports producer Matt Marvin traveled to São Paulo last May to tour the facilities at Corinthians Arena, home of Sport Club Corinthians Paulista, or Corinthians, which plays in Brazil’s top soccer league.
Marvin has produced a lot of sports over the course of his career – he’s currently executive producer of NBC’s “Big Ten Saturday Night” package – and he’s well aware that Corinthians Arena isn’t exactly Camp Randall. It’s smaller than an American football stadium – capacity is just under 50,000 – and, of course, built for soccer. The stadium will be one of the host venues for the 2027 Women’s World Cup and hosted games for the men’s World Cup in 2014.
During the trip, Marvin and a dozen NBC technical executives (and another dozen NFL staffers) met with Corinthians Arena officials to work out the logistics needed to broadcast an NFL game. The result is that NBC will have about 100 people on site monitoring the game, from camera operators to tape editors to security personnel to translators. One of the requests Marvin’s team made of stadium officials was to set up an announcer’s booth for commentators Noah Eagle and Todd Blackledge (Kaylee Hartung will be on the sidelines) that resembles an NFL booth, meaning it’s more enclosed than the traditional football environment where viewers are very close to the commentators.
“It’s a soccer stadium, and we’re doing a football game there,” Marvin said. “The (NHL) Winter Classic is the equivalent I can think of, and I’ve done a lot of that in the past. But a soccer stadium is much more football-focused than a baseball stadium is hockey-focused, so at least the camera positions are more familiar. The traditional soccer positions for cameras aren’t exactly the same as football positions, but we can make adjustments and move things around to make it look like a prime-time football game. There won’t be a camera position that leaves the viewer wondering, ‘What the heck is that?'”
The Eagles-Packers game is unique for obvious reasons. It is the first NFL regular season game in South America and will air exclusively on Peacock, the streaming network’s third exclusive NFL game after 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 at 8:15 p.m. ET, and the game will also be available on free terrestrial TV in the competing teams’ local markets, as well as on mobile devices with NFL+.)
The show will offer some new features for viewers. For example, there will be fewer traditional commercials. There will be three or four in-game spots that keep viewers watching during the usual commercial breaks.
“One of the things that the Peacock game will offer is we’ll do a kind of studio takeover and instead of going to a traditional commercial, we’ll stay on the field and deliver additional content while not taking a traditional commercial break,” said Rob Hyland, coordinating producer for NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.” “That’s actually something that happens at kickoff and at the end of the first quarter.”
The international market represents a tremendous growth opportunity for the NFL. The league has committed to Brazil as a host venue for games and will play a regular-season game in Madrid next season. NFL officials are also eyeing markets in Europe, Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. (On that note, we will likely sell a future television package to a media company centered around international games.)
The Packers’ game against the Eagles is a litmus test not only for the NFL’s potential fan base in Brazil – which the NFL estimates at 36 million, according to a survey by the Brazilian research institute (IBOPE) – but also for the league’s ambitions to get American consumers to pay for the product, no matter the platform. (The athleteBrooks Kubena spent eight days in São Paulo and reported on the NFL’s plans to enter the Brazilian market.)
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“You all know that we are very committed to growing the game for the league and the 32 clubs around the world and expanding our presence in other key markets,” said Peter O’Reilly, NFL executive vice president of international events. “Brazil is a very important market and helps realize that global growth. There are 36 million NFL fans in Brazil, which is the third largest NFL fan base after the United States and Mexico.”
Eagle has never been to South America and the broadcaster said he downloaded some videos of the stadium to familiarize himself with the facility.
“It’s essentially a soccer stadium, and I had that at a Notre Dame-Navy game in Dublin last year,” Eagle said. “That was my first foray into the international differences between what we expect from a soccer stadium in America and what it feels like outside the States.”
If all goes well, it should look like a typical NFL game to viewers at home, with the added benefit of some Brazilian culture thrown in as well. This is only Marvin’s third NFL game as executive producer, including last season’s playoff game between the Cleveland Browns and Houston Texans, but he’s no stranger to an NFL production truck. He previously worked as a replay producer for NFL broadcasts. He’s obviously aware of the NFL’s interest in the game in terms of 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 of anything, you have a responsibility to say, ‘OK, what’s unique about it?'” he said. “We want to capture some 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 fans. The stories of both teams from last season are incredible and there are stars everywhere on the field, so you have to put yourself in the fans’ shoes.”
For more information on streaming NFL games on Fubo, check out: Here.
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(Photo: Brooke Sutton via AP)
