Behind the scenes at Sky Sports for Albion v Watford

We are constantly reminded of the stresses and strains footballers put their bodies through during a gruelling season.

After all, most of us watch them bust a gut from the comfort of our armchairs every weekend.

But have you ever thought about the hearts and minds behind the broadcast operation that get the pictures to your TV screens? Sky Sports invited The Argus to a behind-the-scenes look at its coverage of the Championship league game between Albion and Watford on Saturday – and it is clear the Sky team puts as much effort into a football season as the players do on the pitch.

Sky broadcasts at least 150 Football League games across the entire season, including the Capital One Cup and Johnston Paint fixtures, with up to 75 men and women involved in any one fixture. The on-site broadcast operation takes place in one or two multimillion-pound trucks.

At Albion on Saturday, Sky set up camp in the American Express Community Stadium’s car park, flanked on one side by a catering truck. It’s all rather inconspicuous from the outside. Take a walk up the steps and into the truck, however, and you open the door into a spaceship-type entity with more than 70 different TV screens and a bustling team of presenters and producers to commentators, vision experts, logistics men, make-up artists and more.

Just 15 of the 75 crew are directly employed by Sky, the rest being freelancers or staff working for NEP Visions – the firm which owns the trucks. The overall number of people working on any one game is reduced by 10 for League One games as less cameras are used in the lower echelons of the Football League.

When I walk in Stevie Rowe, Sky’s executive producer for the Football League, is sitting at the back of the first broadcasting room preparing for rehearsals. Sky Sports Football League presenter and ex-Blue Peter front man Simon Thomas is beamed on the screens in front of him, standing pitchside at The Amex.

A one-minute, pre-match interview with Albion boss Chris Hughton has just finished in the tunnel and is played on one of the screens inside the truck. Producer Stevie casts his eye over it, deciding on whether it’s good enough for the viewers back home.

“We’ll have all of that, ” he says. “That’s good.”

Former Everton player and Sky Sports commentator Peter Beagrie is sat next to Stevie, running through vital pieces of information before he joins Thomas pitchside.

“Before the game we’ll be checking that everything works, ” says Stevie, the man in charge of editorial.

“The graphics, all the different lines, the audio sources and so on. We run through it all first, then we’ll do a couple of news crosses to Sky Sports News and Sky News and then we will rehearse.

“We have a nice hour-and-a-half rehearsal. By the time it gets to midday, in most cases we all feel like we’re ready to go live . We’ve got various departments on the truck like graphics and stats here in this room and vision mixers, directors, sound and VT (video tape) controllers in other rooms too.

“We prepare all week for this so on game day I feel excited mostly. The butterflies are there. We’ll start building a running order during the middle of the week and then organise chats with managers or players that we want to speak to ahead of the game.

“Also in the week I look at a comprehensive stats-pack, anything up to 60 pages of information about the teams, players and the fixture – anything that the graphics teams, commentators and presenters can use on the day.”

The man responsible for the mega stats pack is Andy Bishop, who is sitting a row in front of boss Stevie. Andy is responsible for collecting a comprehensive dossier of facts and figures that are eventually relayed to the viewers back home. Anything from ‘Lewis Dunk is Albion’s top scorer with seven goals’ to ‘Albion have been leading at half-time in eight of their matches so far this season’.

“Usually we get our rotas about a month in advance, ” Andy says. “We literally spend any spare time we have, sometimes up to three weeks in advance, collecting stats for games. The real preparation starts about a week before the game and we produce a stat-pack of about fifty to sixty pages that we give to Stevie as quickly as possible.

“Every fan knows their team better than we do so we can’t get it wrong. If we get something wrong it’s obvious to people that are watching. On the back of sending a stat pack out to Stevie and the presenters we talk on the phone and see what stats they want to turn into graphics for the show. On the day we’ll then second guess the managers’ formations, wait for the team selections and get more stats based on, for example, a certain strike force.

“You’ll then want stats and graphics on how they’ve played together this season, what their record is like, how many they have scored when they’ve started together and so on.

“An hour before kick-off until an hour after the match it’s all non-stop. It’s a job for a super-fan, you’ve got to know your football and be prepared to put in a lot of hard hours. You have to think of things nobody’s thought of.”

You could forgive stats man Andy for going to bed with numbers whizzing around his head.

“It never stops, ” he says. “Your head starts rolling in August and you switch off in May. It’s very hard to switch off. But it’s all worth it.”

Like the fans back home, the Sky team hopes that drab 0-0 affairs are kept to a minimum. Peter Beagrie, commentating on the Albion game, admits the team have to work hard when nothing spectacular has happened on the pitch.

“The game dictates what we do. If it’s a drab 0-0 then we have to work hard and look for something to go on. We’re looking for something that may not be there. If it’s 4-4, you’ve got the eight goals to cover and tell the stories around that. If it’s a 0-0 it can be a tougher night.

“That said there’s always a reason why it’s 0-0. Maybe a defence has been absolutely brilliant, maybe somebody put their body on the line and defended really well. That hasn’t happened so much this year though because the Championship has been exciting. It’s been an amazing season. I can’t remember one game where we’ve left and said ‘that was terrible’.”

Executive producer Stevie adds: “In the Football League we’re fortunate that we get closer access to the players, more so than the Premier League.

“We do instant interviews on the pitch, which you can’t do in the Premier League. It’s a real privilege. Our relationship with the Football League allows us to do that, so we can spice things up. And remember we’re not just broadcasting a game to people watching on Sky Sports One.

“We have footage used on Sky Sports News, Sky News, Goals on Sunday and Soccer AM too, plus broadcasters across the world.”

A flurry of production staff come in and out of the truck, sometimes armed with necessities like cans of drink and fruit. There’s a relaxed atmosphere, but also an aura of pure professionalism too. The Argus is introduced to production manager Andy Holmes – the man responsible for linking Sky’s production outfit with NEP Visions, the facilities company.

He says: “I deal with Stevie and his team and also the facilities company, which manages the trucks. I’m in charge of all the logistics.

“I’m here to liaise with the club and put out fires if there are any. Stevie will do all the editorial and he’ll deal with everything on-screen, I deal with the clubs.

“The responsibility for us is that our pictures go out to 150 countries around the world. That’s just our pictures with effects. They take our commentary too but don’t use it. Instead they use it as a guide and put their own over the top.

“Depending on what stadium we’re at we’ll transmit by satellite or fibre cabling. Mostly the Championship grounds are fibre but at Albion it’s satellite. The trucks themselves are worth millions. NEP Visions have the Football League contract for Sky and this truck we’re in was built especially for it.

"It’s an outside broadcast truck that can do anything. Tomorrow it could be doing a concert. It’s built on the Sky footprint but it’s not much different to what anybody else does.”

The same Football League crew work on the same games together, be it Championship, League One or League Two clashes.

“Different teams leapfrog each other, ” Andy explains. “Logistically the team that does Albion will go to Bournemouth on Monday. For this Albion game, some of the guys will have got here on Thursday, including cable riggers who lay all the wire. Then on Friday we’d have got the cameras set up and cables finished.

“By midday Friday the technical teams come in with their cameras, followed by myself and Sky staff. Visions will then rig everything else, do tests, and then on the morning of match day the production team rock up at 9am and do tests and have breakfast. The truck is then handed over at about 10am to Sky.”

Sky’s coverage of Albion’s game includes a 15-minute build up – an operation that requires only one broadcast truck. Across the stadium there are 14 different cameras catching every ball kicked and every word muttered on the pitch.

"We have pitchside cameras, goal-line cameras, a steady-cam which runs up and down the lines, tunnel cameras, super slow-mo cameras as well. Sky doesn’t do shortcuts.

"Albion having a new ground is great to operate in, but a ground like Luton is not really set up for TV. There are 72 clubs in the Football League but some are 125 years old and their infrastructure reflects that. They haven’t changed.

“When they were built TV wasn’t about. Luton is built around houses so we can only operate in a small area, but because we’re there and moving trucks and cameras around the place it takes valuable space away from them.

“Sometimes we’ll have to put cameras where supporters would normally be. At Brighton there’s acres of land, there’s no issues.”

The chit-chat inside the production truck is banished. Attention is now focused on rehearsing for live broadcast at 12pm. Presenter Simon Thomas is still pitchside, this time communicating with a director inside the truck.

He’s reeling off a list of future Sky games that he’s memorised, ready to tell viewers back home about during the half-time break. The Argus leaves the truck and heads inside the stadium to watch Albion’s 2-0 defeat to Watford. Hours after full-time, the Sky crew are already making plans for their trip to Bournemouth in two day’s time.