As a British expatriate living in Los Angeles, Paul Martin found the thing he had missed at home was football.
“If I cross a park and see two people playing, I will stop and watch it,” said the producer of documentary film.
So the idea of making a documentary on a football league was not difficult to sell. The challenge was to find the right league. The English Premier League, with which Martin grew up, was far too buttoned to allow his cameras the access they needed. And he had to believe that Major League Soccer, the first division league that played in his adopted homeland, was not a big stage of these two guys playing in the park.
Not only was reality very different, noted Martin, but MLS was impatient to have this story tell. The result was the documentary centers in eight “Onside: Major League Soccer”, in the first Friday on Apple TV +.
“International, there is a range on the MLS. As,” it's football, but it is not entirely football that we know “,” said Martin. “What is great in the show is that it shows that it is actually damn close to the Premier League. The skills levels of players are increasing each year.”
Now, the League, which said it started to discuss a documentary with Martin over five years ago, hopes that MLS fans will also benefit from it.
“We are always trying to find new ways to connect our existing fans to sport and the league, but also ways to attract new fans,” said Sola Winley, executive vice-president supervising the project. “This opportunity is perfect. Access that fans would not generally see about Major League Soccer is the means for fans to get closer to our game.”
Martin and Box to box films, which he co-founded with the Oscar-winning producer James Gay-Rees, has already done so. The Emmy Laureate series “Formula 1: driving to survive”, “ From its seventh season next month on Netflix, was widely credited with having repopularized the automatic race with open wheels in the United States
“The public was an aging audience who was literally murderous,” said Robert Clarke, president and chief executive officer of Clarke-Works, a consulting company in motorsport, and former executive of Honda Performance Development. “The series (Racing) begin to understand and appreciate that they must be more for fans than to run cars around circles on the racetrack.”
MLS, who opens his 30th season this weekend, is already experiencing record growth. Supported by the presence of Lionel Messi, undoubtedly the biggest player in football history, the League attracted more than 11.45 million regular season fans last season, with an average of 23,234 per match. And he appears to get an additional boost next year when the World Cup is played in the United States for the second time.
But this popularity has not been transported to Apple TV +which enters the third season of a Contract at 10 years and 2.5 billion dollars To broadcast all regular MLS regular season and qualifying matches. Apple and the MLS were extremely kept by the audience numbers, but League Don Garber league commissioner said about 1 million cumulative viewers listening to the 14 League games in many weekends last season. It works at around 71,000 per game.
Martin's docuseries, who will take Apple TV + viewers behind the scenes with many League teams and players for the 2024 season, could change this.
“These types of documents based on teams, athletes and leagues definitively create the notoriety of the brand and create an interest because it is the narration,” said Joseph Recupero, a former sports documentary filmmaker who is now an associate professor in the sports media program in Toronto Metropolitan University. “You always need this cross -attraction so that something becomes very popular.”
The player of the teenager MLS Cavan Sullivan of the Union of Philadelphia.
(Apple TV +)
The Covid-19 pandemic, which has kept most people confined to the house and canceled the sports live for a while, inaugurated a Golden Age of Sports DocumentariesRecupero said, with “The last dance”, “ The collaboration in 10 Netflix-ESPN games in the last season of Michael Jordan with the Chicago Bulls, with an average of 6.71 million viewers.
“People who would never have looked at sports documentaries before were now serious in this area because it was the only place to fill their appetite,” he said. “And it has somehow took off. Documentaries and documentaries like “Formula 1”, that would not have had such a general public before. “
Platforms like Netflix and Apple TV + are the ideal place for narrative sports documentaries. For example, 35% of MLS fans are between 18 and 29 years old, the demography that most strongly looks at the streaming content.
“In 10 years, I do not know if we will even have these conventional radiudiffusers in sport,” said Recupero. “Sports will have all serious streaming.”
Martin, who considers himself an artist and a storyteller above all, certainly benefits. In “Onside”, he tells a nuanced story of MLS and his personalities by spending quality time with the galaxy midfielder, Riqui Puig, the defender of FC Cincinnati Matt Miazga and the teenager of Philadelphia Union Cavanan, who made his debut in MLS last July, for two months before his 15th birthday.
Capturing this flying perspective on the wall has taken some work, especially at the beginning.
“You may have half a day where everyone is very aware of the camera. You have to prevent players from giving you your thumb,” said Martin. “You come to this point (where they stop being so aware of the camera), especially in sports, because what you are doing is day work – the victory of the MLS Cup or the victory of the Monaco Grand Prix – is much more important for these people than your documentary.”
Most of the games of the game were provided by MLS and IMG, who joined forces to produce the live match and the Apple TV + Streams studio program on MLS season Pass. This released Martin's small team from about half a dozen to capture what happened far from the field.
“It is an excellent opportunity as a football fan to be able to really enter the locker room, to get into the conference rooms, to see what is happening,” said Martin, who also made documentaries on the football superstars Diego Maradona and Cristiano Ronaldo as well as the World Surf League.
“Once MLS had concluded his 10-year agreement with Apple, it just made sense, using this as a way to show a different perspective,” he continued. “So it has become an effort to collaborate” What could be this show? ” What could it look like? »»
Now that the question has been answered, Winley, executive vice-president of the MLS, said that the League would monitor the comments on the project while planning a second series of episodes next winter.
“Stories can continue,” he said. “It is rare that any production company will come back there in the hope that it is a season. We therefore hope that it will be a multi-season process. And I believe that Apple hopes the same thing.”
It is certainly beating to watch two guys kick in a park.
