Behind the scenes in the Champions League with Amazon Prime

There are just under five hours to go before Amazon Prime’s coverage of the Champions League tie between Liverpool and Bayer Leverkusen begins and 16 people have crammed into a Winnebago parked a stone’s throw from Anfield.

Dylan Clive, a producer at Sunset+Vine, takes centre stage and talks the production team through a 24-page document that details the upcoming show’s running order.

They hope a strategic decision will result in Xabi Alonso, Leverkusen’s manager and a former Liverpool midfielder, spotting pundit Luis Garcia — a team-mate of his at Anfield — as he gets off the German visitors’ bus and then greeting him. They want to broadcast a potential exchange between the pair live. Garcia will be positioned in an area the teams walk through upon arrival. It is also noted that they are still waiting on permission to film a segment inside the home dressing room.

The meeting lasts around 20 minutes before the Winnebago empties again. There is a make-up room at the back, a small bathroom to shower in and a white sofa. Tea and coffee are on the side, the fridge is empty and the snacks — nuts, chocolates, biscuits and raspberries — don’t arrive until later in the day.

Prime Video is here to broadcast its fourth Champions League fixture to viewers in the United Kingdom after a deal agreed in 2022 saw it obtain the rights to 17 first-pick Tuesday night fixtures, up to and including the semi-finals in the 2024-25, 2025-26 and 2026-27 seasons.

The Athletic went behind the scenes with its team at Anfield…

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Not long after the TV compound outside the stadium emptied on Saturday night following Liverpool’s 2-1 home win against Brighton that afternoon, it started to fill again. Amazon moved in and began getting everything in place for Tuesday night.

There were 27 cameras to set up long before the Leverkusen match, which involves running miles of cabling from the TV compound to various positions around the ground.

The Champions League broadcast was unique because Prime Video also had their German production team at Anfield — they have the rights to the competition in Germany, too. On the morning of the game, there was a Team UK vs Team Germany padel match, which the visitors won.

Prime Video’s UK on-air team for the Leverkusen match included presenter Gabby Logan, pundits Frank Lampard, Garcia and Clarence Seedorf, commentators Alan Shearer and Jon Champion, pitchside reporters Alex Aljoe and Gabriel Clarke, and referee analyst Mark Clattenburg. Behind the scenes, there were more than 150 people on site — producers, assistant producers, make-up artists, sound engineers, camera operators, directors and catering staff.

Andrew Hornett, Prime Video’s director of live sports production for Europe and the person in charge and ultimately responsible for the broadcasts that will go out in the UK and Germany, gave The Athletic a tour of the TV compound. 

Hornett noted how those working in the sound and graphics teams often have the most difficult task, as so much can go wrong. This was evident during the show when Seedorf lost talkback audio during one segment and could no longer hear what Logan was saying to him, with Hornett also mentioning after the match that there were issues with microphones making “funny sounds”.

In one TV truck, a team of vision engineers looked after the seven presentation cameras and the Cinecam, which is small and balances on a gimbal to allow them to get into “never-been-before locations”. Staff in another truck are looking after the match cameras, which, as their name suggests, focus on the action on the pitch.

There’s an interesting challenge on the night, with Liverpool being involved. As one vision engineer puts it, red — the predominant colour not only of the home team’s kit but so many shirts, scarves and hats in the stands too — is a difficult colour for cameras to get correct.

They also deployed the Spidercam, which is suspended in the air by cables and moves horizontally and vertically around the pitch. If the ball is in play, it needs to remain around 18m (60ft) up, but it is allowed to drop much lower when the action stops.

Hornett says “a lot of detail is in the planning” when it comes to ensuring viewers are given the best angles. “Camera operatives have a sequence of how they work,” he explains. “Camera One has to be at a certain width, not too wide, not too tight, Cameras Two and Four are close-up cameras. Camera Two will focus on the attacker, Camera Four on the defender.”

Hornett says Camera Three, located on the halfway line at a low level, gives you the “golden shot”, but can sometimes be blocked off by players or the referee. 

Usually, the Prime team position one camera so it has a view of the dugouts. But with Alonso returning to Anfield, they train two cameras in that direction, one to cover Liverpool coach Arne Slot, another for the Leverkusen manager.

Jamie Oakford directs the match broadcast — controlling what the viewer sees at home. “The hardest thing about directing is choosing your moment to do something,” Oakford tells The Athletic. “The game has become a lot faster, especially with teams playing out from the back. 

“In previous years, when the ball used to go out of play, you would have 20 to 30 seconds to get your replays in and tell the story. But when it goes out of play now, goalkeepers are kicking it straight away and the team is 40 yards up the pitch. 

“You have less time to manage, and that has been the hardest part of directing in the last five years. Time has become so much more important. And because we have so many cameras, you want to get lots of replays in. The better the game, the less you can show off, because you want to let it breathe naturally. It is a balance.”

Next door to Oakford’s spot is the VT (video tape — pre-taped segments) room, where a team of people are watching, on average, the footage coming from three to four cameras each and will be constantly flagging points in the match. If Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah plays what could be a key pass, it gets marked. If Florian Wirtz loses possession for Leverkusen, it gets marked.

All these marks, however, are the same colour, as opposed to being a colour-coded system for attacking moves, defensive actions, and passes. Each operative in the VT room also has to write down what each flag relates to, so that it is easy and quick to show a replay of what just happened.

“You naturally develop a way of thinking and know where the cameras are going to be and what you are going to get from each camera,” adds Hornett. “You’ll know the best angle to go to, always trying to work wide to tight. Everything is super-quick, gets fed into the director and decisions are made instantly.”

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Shearer is the first member of the on-air team to arrive, at 2.50pm. He’s closely followed by Logan. “When it is an English team involved, you generally know a lot more about that team and tend to weight your chat more towards that team,” Logan tells The Athletic.

“We have quite a constructed 90-minute build-up in the sense that we have got a lot of VTs and we have also got people we will hit to in the ground. We move our pundits around quite a lot because 90 minutes is a long build-up, and you have to be on it with where your chats are going.”

Around 10 to 15 minutes before heading pitchside for their rehearsal, with Logan and Garcia out pre-recording the opening scenes inside Liverpool’s dressing room, the conversation inside the Winnebago takes an interesting turn.

The issue of wearing a poppy, a longstanding British symbol of remembrance commemorating the end of the First World War on November 11, 1918, and a show of support to armed forces and veterans, is raised with Seedorf. All of the other on-air talent are wearing one, but the four-time Champions League winner, who is from the Netherlands, wants to know more about what it means.

It was evident he was under no pressure to wear one, but was talked through why they are symbolic and the message they convey. 

In the background of the poppy chat, Shearer and Clattenburg were engaged in a conversation about whether Manchester United’s Lisandro Martinez should have been sent off for his challenge on Cole Palmer of Chelsea at the weekend.

Seedorf emerged from the Winnebago wearing a poppy and headed to the rehearsal, where his first port of call was to take a selfie with Garcia, Logan and Lampard.

During rehearsals, Garcia broke off to have a chat with Billy Hogan, Liverpool’s chief executive. Logan opened a set of hand warmers to put in her pockets as the night-time temperature dropped.

As part of the build-up, Lampard wanted to discuss Leverkusen’s back three and how they use their wing-backs. This was spoken about at the earlier production meeting and he was given around two minutes to talk through his analysis, which he had studied in the days before the match.

“Tonight is interesting because it’s a back four against a very successful back three, so I wanted to talk about wing-backs,” ex-England midfielder and former Chelsea and Everton manager Lampard tells The Athletic. “You want to make it concise and understandable for the person at home, but that is not a million miles away from management, when you are building into a game with players. You want to be very clear, get to the point, and show them the things you see.”

Seedorf takes a somewhat more laid-back approach.

“I don’t do much (prep work) because every game is different,” he tells The Athletic. “A coach can prepare for a game and then, in five minutes, everything can change. So if they have to deal with what is happening in the game, then this is how I like to approach it.

“I like to see if I can find certain patterns during the game that we can highlight for the people at home. It is constantly reading beyond what you see on the screen. I try not to follow the ball all the time, so you can pick up on body language and reactions after the ball is gone, what is happening in the defence and what is happening in the attack.”

Logan notes that some of the strongest prepared material can often end up being dumped due to time constraints.

In the commentary booth for the night are Champion and Shearer, who have worked together fewer than 10 times and, before Tuesday night, on only three occasions for Prime Video.

Champion will start preparing notes around three days before a match, going to Wyscout (an online database of football footage, often used by scouts) to watch clips of different players. For this one, he focused on Leverkusen’s team, having already watched Liverpool several times this season for Premier League broadcasts.

“It’s a bit like studying for an exam at school,” Champion says. “I was hopeless at them, but it is all short-term memory. I could have a meaningful conversation with you about Leverkusen now, but ask me in two days and I would be floundering.”

The commentary duo spoke on Monday, going through the two teams and name pronunciations, and have formed a natural on-air relationship. As part of the production, and in what is a relatively new concept in the UK, Shearer and Champion were also pitchside ahead of the game to do a live segment.

When they are commentating from their place high in the stands, they are hearing from Oakford who will be informing them on what is going to be on screen next. Oakford will flag to them if they are going to show a replay, so they are prepared, or whether they are going to pan to the crowd.

“I try to tell it how it is on the night, what’s going wrong and what is going right, who can change the game and how they can change it, rather than who and what they are as players,” adds Shearer.

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One of the final key figures to arrive is Alex Green, managing director of Prime Video Sport International, who popped into the Winnebago at 7.30pm, having landed back in London that afternoon from a work trip to Mexico.

“The Premier League is going after this season (when Amazon’s deal expires), but this (Champions League) really takes it up a level,” Green tells The Athletic. “It isn’t quite as simple as selling subscriptions, although that is obviously one part of it. We always take the view that you have to start with value and benefit, and then other things will follow, such as staying with Prime and advocating for it, so it is not just how many people sign up.”

As for how they decide which game to show on each Tuesday night (there were eight other possibilities this week), Green says “a lot” of thought goes into it. He says: “We want to give balance to teams, we look at audience numbers. 

“The good thing now is that we have a lot of data we can use to model stuff. In the early days of our Premier League coverage, we didn’t have any data. But now we can model stuff and we can form views and that drives our thinking a lot.”

With kick-off approaching, Hornett stations himself inside a studio in the Sir Kenny Dalglish Stand with several other figures, including Nick Moody, head of sports broadcasting at Sunset+Vine. He had already compiled a page of notes about what he liked and hadn’t liked about the broadcast so far.

During the match, Logan, Lampard, Seedorf and Garcia return to the Winnebago to watch the action. The pundits are in constant dialogue with analysts about the talking points and what they should discuss at half-time. Even though the game was goalless at the break and there was little action of note to analyse, time remains of the essence.

“The key to half-time is brevity, which is in contrast to the build-up, because you have 90 minutes,” says Logan. “Half-time is about making sure my questions are short and tight, so the pundits can talk.

“Sometimes you have to give them a little eye, but most pundits I work with tend to be experienced, so often know what 30 seconds or one minute feels like.”

Liverpool scored four goals in a dominant second-half display, three of them by Luis Diaz, giving Logan and the pundits plenty to discuss at full time.

They were joined by both Alonso and Slot pitchside before and after the match, something they said they hoped would happen during the production meeting more than seven hours ago. But it was Aljoe’s multilingual interview with Colombian Diaz that caught the attention of many — including Hornett.

A post-match interview with a difference… @alexaljoe translating her own questions, and then Luis Diaz’s answers! 👏🇨🇴#UCLonPrime pic.twitter.com/TnR3xDAJeS

— Amazon Prime Video Sport (@primevideosport) November 6, 2024

“I would say Frank was fantastic, and I love seeing how he is improving as a broadcaster, how seriously he takes it and how hard he is working at it,” Hornett responded when asked about the aspects he was most pleased about.

“Alex Aljoe doing a live translation with Luis Diaz after the game and doing it accurately, enthusiastically and brilliantly; being in the tunnel before kick-off, getting a player straight off the bus, and some really nice pieces. There are lots of things we can be happy about, but you are never totally happy until you create the perfect programme, which has never happened or never will happen.”

The on-air talent arrived back in the Winnebago at around 10.30pm before heading either home or to the Hilton hotel in Liverpool’s city centre if they live further away. Hornett returned to the TV compound with three pages of notes that will be dissected next week.

“You look at what technically could have been done better, what graphics could have been done better, talent, editorial decisions and whether you could have made different ones,” he says. “It is very easy to sit and analyse what you could have done better. It is a live situation where you are having to make fast decisions all the time. I am just really happy we have a great team.”

As the pundits and senior executives head for the car park’s exit, the production staff have already begun packing everything away. The catering truck has gone, cables are being reeled in and camera equipment stowed.

By Wednesday morning, there will be no sight of any of this. Anfield’s TV compound will be empty.

But with the countdown already on for Prime Video’s next Champions League fixture, Manchester City against Dutch visitors Feyenoord on November 26, they will already be thinking about how they can strive for the “perfect” show, knowing it will never come.

(Photos: Dan Sheldon/The Athletic and Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)