Just a week after FIFA officials were arrested for corruption charges and President Sepp Blatter was controversially reelected, FOX Sports is looking to put the athletes back in the spotlight as the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2015 kicks off this week. The company will deliver all 52 matches across FOX, FOX Sports 1 and FOX Sports 2 starting Saturday with Canada/China at 6p. With the U.S. Women’s National Team once again among the favorites to take the Cup, despite not winning wince 1999, FOX has gone all out to promote the event, tapping everything from American Idol to The Simpsons to drive tune-in. Coverage will also include an unprecedented 16 matches airing live on FOX broadcast network between June 6 and July 5, with every match and program also streamed live on FOX Sports GO.
Overall, FOX has nearly 200 hours in the cards, averaging between six and seven hours a day over the month-long tournament, including pregame, halftime and postgame shows for all games as well as a nightly one-hour wrap-up show, entitled Women’s World Cup Tonight. Cynopsis Sports spoke with David Neal, FIFA Women’s World Cup on FOX Executive Producer, about the plans, FIFA and driving the games.
Neal on producing a big event: We really can’t wait to get started. This is now three years in the process of planning. The thing for me that started it all was my first meeting with David Hill and Eric Shanks. We were discussing this role and they made it clear back then that this Women’s World Cup is going to get the full resources of the company and this was not meant to be a boutique event or a laboratory for 2018. It was going to be a fully-supported, major event for the company. Three years down the road, that has held completely true. The support I have gotten throughout the company from financial to marketing has been consistent with every big event I have experienced throughout my career.
On pulling it together: You have to assemble all the right people and all the right parts. The thing about a big event like the World Cup or the Olympics is that there are so many facets to it. The worst thing you can do is try to address it all at once, because that is simply impossible. You have to prioritize; you have to make sure that the programming and storytelling are sound. Then, on a daily basis, you have to move the piece that needs the most attention. It is like a mosaic, and what you want is by the time you hit day one, everything is in place.
On new voices: We’ve got a lot of fresh faces. If you look at the talent group that we’ve announced, I think you will find a lot of people who are contemporary to the game. Our analysts, without exception, know what it’s like to be on that field so that was an important component when it came to our search for talent. They needed to be contemporary who can relate to the players out there on the field when it came to this World Cup.
On production tools: The biggest tool we have is our spectacular two-level set on the harbor in Vancouver. It is an indoor-outdoor set, with the upstairs a fairly-traditional anchor desk with a lot of touch screen technology surrounding it while downstairs is a more casual, conversational area. We, of course, also have a practice pitch out in front as well. The environment will be electric and the set will take full advantage of that.
On digital content: Not only will there be full access to the games, but our overall features and profile unit is going to crank out over 60 athlete profiles as well. These profiles are meant to make that connection between audiences and players, teams and countries that they may not be familiar with. I bring that up because, because your time constraints are pretty small. You may end up doing two to two and half minutes a night, so we are going to use digital to post director’s cuts of nearly every single one of those 60 profiles. The natural editing process when you are producing a feature is that you get it to your ideal length, which is normally five to six minutes long, and then the reality is that you have to take more than half of that out to get it to a more manageable length for broadcast. So instead of letting that longer version hit the floor and never be seen, we are going to post it on our digital site and drive the audience there. It is added value content for our viewers and the perfect use a digital platform.
On covering the FIFA scandals: We’ll be in Canada for the next six weeks to cover the 52 games of the Women’s World Cup, for which the teams and athletes have spent years preparing. Should important soccer-related news happen during the tournament we’ll use FOX Sports’ significant news assets to report and comment as needed.
